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We’ve sung it since childhood: He’s got the whole world in his hands. Yet when the personal “you and me” gets stripped away, what’s left is a distant abstraction. In Matthew 8 a leper kneels and forces the real question—does the Lord who can hold everything actually will to hold him?
When the old broken software finally gives way to something that works, the last thing you'd do is press every button just to break the new one on purpose. Yet that same impulse faces us in the Christian life, and Paul confronts it head-on in Romans 6:14-15: since we are not under law but under grace, shall we sin?
Even good things we pursue can drift from their real meaning into empty gestures that change nothing. Sin whispers the same trade—“focus on me and I’ll give you what you want”—yet Paul answers it in Romans 6: do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires, but present yourselves to God as those brought from death to life.
We begin a new series in the Psalms tonight, looking at David’s lament in Psalm 12. What happens when we feel like evil has triumphed and whatever good we do is fruitless?
We too often forget that the source is joyful and accept the far more mundane or depressing secondhand source.
We too often forget that the source is joyful and accept the far more mundane or depressing secondhand source.
Two half-brothers leave for the same war; only one comes home. When rescue divides one person from another, “Why me?” can feel unanswerable—and salvation can raise the same uneasy question. In 1 Timothy 1:15–16, Paul refuses to ground his rescue in merit, calling himself the worst of sinners and pointing instead to Christ’s purpose and patience.
Are we a mess? So was Paul. Can God use us? Absolutely.
We need to know what things are for and use them in the right way in life. That’s true of God’s law just like anything else.
When God's holiness draws near, our first instinct is often to back away—to put some distance between ourselves and the One whose law shows us how unholy we are. That's exactly what Israel does in Exodus 20 after hearing the Ten Commandments: they tremble at the mountain and tell Moses, “You speak to us… but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.”
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