So your weaknesses are not the big danger that you should fear. What you should really fear are your delusions of strength. When you tell yourself that you are strong, you quit being excited about God's rescuing, transforming, and empowering grace.

Grace is only ever attractive to sinners.

But the message of the gospel is devastatingly humbling. It tells me that I am in a hopeless, impossible, and irreversible state apart from divine intervention.

Prayer is abandoning my righteousness, admitting my need for forgiveness, and resting in the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ.

First, the gospel is the world's best love story. It is a story of a God of love who places his love on people who do not deserve his love. This God sends the Son of his love to make a sacrifice of love so that his children can be welcomed into his arms of love and become a community of love that takes his love to those in desperate need of that love.

If you obey God for a thousand years, you will not have earned more of his acceptance than you were granted the very first moment you believed.

Healthy ministry communities, which leave a legacy of long-term gospel productivity, have longevity and fruit because they are, at their core, communities of grace. Rather than achievement forming how the leadership community forms itself and operates, the gospel does.

Seeing yourself as hopeless and helpless if left to yourself initiates and ignites your pursuit of God's grace.

We don't offer people a system; we point them to a Redeemer. He is hope.

the Bible is not a collection of stories, but one big story with lots of chapters. It is the story of how God meets weak and failing people with his powerful grace.

The courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable…. This is the genuine meaning of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of 'justification by faith

grace for the race; grace for the place; and grace for the case.