Podcast: Gospel in Life

Christianity is never a mechanical thing. And the church is not a morality agency—it’s a regenerating agency. The real goal of the do’s and the don’ts in the Christian life is always character—growing into God’s holy people. The church does bring about moral behavior but, in a sense, as a byproduct. Because what the church…

Whenever God turns to you, if you believe in him, all he sees when he looks at you is complete beauty and sweetness. Jesus Christ offered himself up and fulfilled all of the obligations we owe God, so he has completely satisfied God. God sees nothing and senses nothing but sweetness when he regards you….

A good test shows you what you really are, what’s really in you. If you’re in denial, the tests are devastating. If you’re dropping the ball, the tests are traps. Jesus says the only way you’re going to come through the tests of life is if you seek God. How are you doing right now?…

In this passage, we finally get to a particular kind of prayer in which people are very interested: to the place where Jesus says prayer is a way to change our circumstances.  Prayer makes a difference. You can come to God and say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” But notice this happens in…

I’ll say it consciously: this is our worst nightmare. More than anyone else in history, modern people believe we ought to have a good life and we ought to have some control over our lives. But Jesus says when you connect with God, you must pray, “Thy will be done.”  This means the purpose of…

What does it mean to hallow? It’s a word virtually never used anymore in everyday English, but we don’t quite have an equivalent.  To hallow something means to treat it as sacred and ultimate. It means to make something your ultimate concern, to make it the most important thing, to make it the most crucial…

Jesus doesn’t just point the way to God—rather, he is the way to God because he’s risen. And that means that for Christians, prayer is a unique, radically different process than it is for other religions and philosophies.  Prayer is a rather universal thing, and there are many ways to pray. But Jesus says there…

The Psalms is the divinely inspired prayer book, but when you open this prayer book, the first page is not a prayer. It’s a meditation on meditation. Meditation is not the same as studying the Bible. In studying the Bible you’re just learning information. Meditation takes what you’ve learned and does something with it. And…

The Lord’s Prayer is quite a workout. You’re asking for a lot of things: daily bread, deliver us from evil. But at the end, you rest in God.  The last phrase in the Lord’s Prayer is, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever, amen.” Is that just a…

We don’t see that envy is as terrible as it really is. Envy is wanting somebody else’s life. Do you know what that does? It sucks the joy out of the life you actually have.  In Psalm 73, the psalmist is living as good a life as he can, and everything is going wrong. And…