Why We Must Keep the Gospel in View Every Day
Without a rich, ongoing experience of the gospel, the Christian life can slowly drift toward legalism, hypocrisy, performance, exhaustion, or apathy.
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Without a rich, ongoing experience of the gospel, the Christian life can slowly drift toward legalism, hypocrisy, performance, exhaustion, or apathy.
The ordinary practices of gathered worship may seem unimpressive to the world: preaching, prayer, singing, water, bread, and wine. Yet these are the very means God has ordained to strengthen faith, nourish his people, and display his glory.
There is a quiet fear that often settles into the church: the fear that gospel witness belongs to someone else. To pastors. To theologians. To trained apologists with answers ready and words carefully chosen. For the rest of us, evangelism can feel intimidating—something best left to professionals. In that mindset, the gospel feels precious, even fragile, and we worry that we might mishandle it. What if we say too little? What if we say the wrong thing? What if I’m too young? What if our past disqualifies us from speaking at all? But Scripture consistently tells a different story. The...
Love means acknowledging that other people are made in God’s image, and pursuing God’s best for them, often in a way that is self-sacrificial.
Scripture tells us to be like Jesus. Does that mean we should call hypocritical leaders “blind fools” and a “brood of vipers” like Jesus does in Matthew 23? Does imitating Jesus mean we should make a whip of cords, curse a fig tree, and flip a table in a temple? Should we make it our goal to do the same? And if not, why not? Clearly it is not enough to say we should imitate Jesus, as if that answers every question. We need to think a bit more carefully about this question. We should not go out of our...
