Grace isn't about "fair," but about the outrageous, radical love of God.

When we assume that God's love is based on our behavior we've set ourselves up for a devastating fall.

God—who totally accepts you, no matter what—to help you love and accept yourself.

Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life doesn't have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves, validate ourselves.

There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.

The introduction of the Protestant religion into Ireland may be principally attributed to George Browne, an Englishman, who was consecrated archbishop of Dublin on the nineteenth of March, 1535.

The main thing between you and God is not so much your sins; it's your damnable good works.

No man is so regenerate, but that continually he has need of the means which Christ Jesus has appointed to be used in his kirk.

Our conduct is not the basis for our salvation, but is influenced by our salvation.

The sixteenth-century parallel: (1) medieval scholasticism as a synthesis between the Bible, Plato, and Aristotle; (2) the heresy of works-salvation, perhaps with Tetzel as an extreme case; (3) Luther the Reformer, who like Athanasius pushes hard for the fundamental principle of justification by faith alone; and (4) Calvin the consolidator, who rethinks the whole of theology in the light of the knowledge gained in the Reformation.

Sinful self and all its wretched failures should be sufficiently noticed so as to keep us in the dust before God. Christ and His great salvation should be contemplated so as to lift us above self and fill the soul with thanksgiving.

It is finished." Reader, do you believe it? Or are you trying to add something of our own to the finished work of Christ to secure the favor of God?