Eternal life is not a gift from God, eternal life is the gift of God.

Sin is a fundamental relationship—it is not wrong doing, but wrong being—it is deliberate and determined independence from God. The Christian faith bases everything on the extreme, self-confident nature of sin.

One of the penalties of sin is our acceptance of it.

Sin makes us moral quadriplegics.

The Bible says that our core problem, the fundamental reason we do what we do, is sin.

This is what sin does to us all. At a deep and often unnoticed level, sin replaces worship of God with worship of self. It replaces submission with self-rule. It replaces gratitude with demands for more. It replaces faith with self-reliance. It replaces vertical joy with horizontal envy. It replaces a rest in God's sovereignty with a quest for personal control. We live for our glory. We set up our rules. We ask others to serve our agenda.

Sin holds the physical glories of the here-and-now world in front of you and tells you that they are the only glories worth living for. Sin shrinks your zeal and narrows your vision. Sin makes it hard to see beyond the borders of your own life. Grace enables you to tear down fences of self-focus, self-defensiveness, and self-protection so you can reach out to God and others. In so doing you will not only experience true glory, but you will recapture your true humanity.

Let's start the new year by admitting that there is nothing less natural for us than to live for the glory of another. This admission is the doorway not to despair, but to hope. God knew that in your sin you would never live this way, so he sent his Son to live the life you couldn't, to die on your behalf, and to rise again, conquering sin and death. He did this so that you would not only be forgiven for your allegiance to you own glory, but have every grace you need to live for his.

Denying sin makes a liar out of God and denies the message of his Word. Here's the bottom line—either God, in his Word, is true when he says that you have a problem you can't solve or you're right that you're not so bad after all. It can't be both ways.

It really is possible to live in a state of Advent schizophrenia, where you celebrate the birth of the Messiah while actively denying your need for his birth, life, death, and resurrection.

God has given you the gift of his Son, not to make your little kingdom successful, but to welcome you to a much better kingdom. Now what in the world does that mean? Paul David Tripp

The person next to you doesn't need the gospel more than you do; he just needs it differently than you do. All people sin and fall short.