Responsibility is good for your soul

Indifference was our greatest enemy.

God transforms us one area at a time.

A moment with Jesus changed everything.

Grace is a person. And his name is Jesus.

You didnt access love, love accessed you!

It seemed too good to be true. That's grace.

Grace is God-given power to live differently.

We are often harsher judges than God himself.

Rules are not bad, but they can't save anyone.

The common denominator is that we all need help.

Be the same person privately, publically and personally.

Don't cheapen Jesus's sacrifice by trying to pay him back

Notorious sinners didn’t kill Jesus. Religious people did.

Once you savor God's goodness, sin holds no lasting appeal.

Sometimes God takes your life for some crazy twists and turns.

Jesus didn’t care about the scandal. He cared about the scandalous.

We need a bigger estimation of God and a smaller estimation of sin.

A father doesn't say, 'Don't go that way.' He says, 'ome follow me.'

Sometimes our brains are our own worst enemy because grace isn't logical.

You don’t have to be good to be Jesus’s friend. You just have to be honest.

I’ve never met a person who exaggerated God’s love. Never. It’s impossible.

Jesus sees our sin more clearly than anyone, yet He loves us more than anyone.

But difficult situations and wrong choices conspire to trap us in hopelessness.

Are you struggling with sin? You don’t need more will power. You need more of Jesus.

If you dont love, youve lost your distinction, definition, uniqueness, and identity.

What an opportunity we have to be a community....A community where there are models.

The Bible is meant to be down-to-earth. It was written for real people facing real issues.

It is absolutely essential to have a living visible example of what a Christian ought to be.

Our righteousness doesn't depend on our present performance but on Jesus' finished performance.

I wonder if we have a lot of sons running around saying, "I want a Dad." But you won't abide in anyone.

If we could get people to think about Jesus, we reasoned, Jesus was more than able to reveal himself to them.

Make rules and follow rules as needed, but don't focus on riles. Focus on faith. Focus on grace. Focus on Jesus.

What we do on Sunday absolutely doesn't matter unless it meets us on Monday. Changes us on Monday. Transforms us on Monday.

We need to abandon our scale and adopt God's because our misguided labels keep us from the right kind of interaction with people.

Christianity is not about not swearing. It’s not about not having impure thoughts. Really, it’s not about not at all. Christianity is about Jesus.

Don't allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out.

When we meet grace, it becomes the fuel of our faith. We pray, we read our Bibles, we worship and we live the purest lifestyle we can because we love a person.

It’s interesting how people try to redefine God to their liking. They bring him down to their level so they can understand him, then they reject him because he is too much like them.

Nowhere in the Bible, however, do we find God distinguishing between levels of sin. God doesn't share our rating system. To him, all sin is equally evil, and all sinners are equally lovable.

God is not in a hurry to fix us. Our behavior is not his first priority. We are his first priority. Loving us, knowing us, affirming us, protecting us. That is his top goal and his main concern.

Don't you know you are the only Jesus many people will ever see? In compromising your lifestyle, you forfeit your capacity to accurately reflect God's image and endanger an entire generation's understanding of Jesus.

Sometimes we get way too fixated on how powerful sin is and how weak we are. We worry that if we relax for a second, we'll mess up royally and ruin everything. Ironically, our paranoia only serves to make us more conscious of our sinfulness.

God's love is so extravagant and so inexplicable that he loved us before we were us. He loved us before we existed. He knew many of us would reject him, hate him, curse him, rebel against him. Yet he chose to love us. God loves us because he is love.

When you look in the eyes of grace, when you meet grace, when you embrace grace, when you see the nail prints in grace’s hands and the fire in his eyes, when you feel his relentless love for you - it will not motivate you to sin. It will motivate you to righteousness.

I think people would be surprised to discover that their challenges and struggles are not too dissimilar to us, average ordinary people. We're all looking for essentially the same thing and I think that's faith and hope and love and meaning and of course satisfaction, peace, joy.

Sometimes we are outright rude when we interact with people. We meet a gay guy or a couple living together, and we think we have the obligation and right to warn them what God thinks about their sexuality on our first meeting. As if their sex life is the first thing on God's agenda.It's not.Love is. Grace is. Mercy is. Jesus is.

I think if Jesus had one shot at fixing us, He’d tell us how much He loves us. Jesus loves us right now, just as we are. He isn’t standing aloof, yelling at us to climb out of our pits and clean ourselves up so we can be worthy of Him. He is wading waist-deep into the muck of life, weeping with the broken, rescuing the lost, and healing the sick.

That’s how we often react when grace comes at us. It’s awkward. God offers us something that’s too good to be true—unearned, unmerited, total forgiveness—and we stand there, stiff and uncomfortable, waiting for the embrace to stop so we can get back to the business of earning our way into heaven. We need to embrace grace. We need to learn how to hug back.

Jesus is not your accuser. He’s not your prosecutor. He’s not your judge. He’s your friend and your rescuer. Like Zacchaeus, just spend time with Jesus. Don’t hide from him in shame or reject him in self-righteousness. Don’t allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him for yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out.

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