Let me reassure you right now that God is not keeping score. God is not awarding points for good behavior or deducting points for being less than perfect.
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But God’s grace is the great leveler. If sin makes hypocrites of us all, God’s grace covers us all equally.
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A crucified Messiah. The very concept would have been any oxymoron. It still is. We like our Messiahs victorious and glorious.
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Caesar can stamp his likeness on all the coins he wants, Jesus suggests, but the true image of God is not stamped on a coin but hung from a cross.
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But God’s power is not all right. In contrast with the direct forcefulness of right-handed power, left-handed power is paradoxical power
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The righteousness of Jesus is his willingness to empty himself of all authority and take up the cross.
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The currency of the kingdom of heaven is not fairness but grace. And when it comes to grace, God is a big spender, perhaps even generous to a fault…
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But if the message we hear is “forgive or else,” then what we’ve done is turned the whole concept of forgiveness into just another law.
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And so what makes us Christian is not whether or not we wound one another—we do—but rather how we go about mending those wounds.
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Taking up your cross means dying to any attempt to save yourself through righteous deeds.
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Peter’s testimony that Jesus is the Messiah…speaks the eternal truth on which the church stands and against which all the powers of hell cower and tremble.
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Through this woman’s dogged faith we learn that faith is not about the righteous and their rituals; faith is about sinners who cry to Jesus, “Lord, help me!”
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Yes, it’s true that Jesus says to Peter, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” But rather than hearing that as criticism, I invite us to hear it as praise. Yes, praise!
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The church at its best represents an alternative to the hyper-individualistic, achievement-driven, status-obsessed nature of so much of our society.
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The kingdom of heaven isn’t about what waits for us in the sweet hereafter; it’s about what God is doing here and now.
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The preamble begins, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union….” Please note that it’s not “Weed the people in order to form a more perfect union.”
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Whether people respond to the Word of God when it’s read or preached or proclaimed is largely a mystery that’s beyond our control. Leave that to the Holy Spirit.
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But here’s the thing: the day of judgment is not a threat that Jesus holds over the heads of nonbelievers or anyone else for that matter.
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