Legalism is a more dangerous disease than alcoholism because it doesn't look like one.

The question that Jesus drives us to ask again and again is not, "How much should I give?" but rather, "How much dare I keep?"

If the church has no compelling reasons for believing the biblical portrait of Jesus, then we are acting like well-trained animals who can be turned this way and that by arbitrary incentives.

If you ever meet a man who cares nothing for the praise and approval of men (Mark 12:14), but whose one controlling desire is to glorify God whom he loves with all his heart, believe that man. He is true.

Turn away from all the intellectual, physical, and religious tactics the world uses to evade its guilt, and rest in Jesus.

There is no true freedom where happiness depends on denying the inevitable; there is only slavery disguised in a thousand forms of fun and busyness.

We don't have a deep sense of peace and fulfillment when we have successfully deluded everybody about who we really are or what we really feel or think. There is a deep (and I believe God-given) longing to be authentic, not to be hypocrites.

Trusting Christ as Savior, surrendering to him as Lord, and orienting all of your family relations on him, transforms the home into a little heaven on earth.

We crave to be moved by some rare glimpse of greatness. We yearn for a vision of glory.

Jesus was not accidentally entangled in a web of injustice. The saving benefits of his death for sinners were not an afterthought. Jesus saw that the time had come and set his face to fulfill his mission: to die in Jerusalem for our sake.

When Jesus commits his mother to John's care, he is showing us how our needs will be met when we leave everything to follow him.

Faith never says, "The righteousness that leads to life is inaccessible." But faith recognizes its own helplessness and gladly accepts this righteousness as a gift from God.

What counts in the new people is not who your parents are but whom you live for; and therefore a new symbol for the new covenant people is given, baptism.

If you want to enjoy God's peace and be the aroma of his grace in the world, your knowledge of him has to grow.

If the knowledge of God's glorious promises does not spur us on to strive against the tide, then we will be barren and fruitless and drift to our destruction.

The difference between mythical speculations and Christian faith is history. Our doctrines are not the result of clever head-work. They are the result of historical observation.

The meaning of Scripture does not change with every new reader or every new reading. It cannot be twisted to mean whatever we like. It is what it is, unchanging and unending.

Even though the rebellious and the licentious today may think they are safe, they should learn that "from of old their condemnation has not been idle, and their destruction is not sleeping."

The more you know of Christ and his way, the more severe your judgment will be for not trusting and obeying him.

Confident expectation of a new world of righteousness empowers us to live for peace and purity in the present.

A life lived for the world will go naked into judgment; a life lived for Christ will be laden with eternal riches.

The best fertilizer for our hope and godliness is the knowledge of our future in God's grace.

Silence about Christ is dogma. Not to teach the infinite value of Christ is to teach that he is negligible.

How different, how wonderful the use of our mouths would be if we lived by faith in the God who made the mouth and not by sight—by looking at our own clumsy tongue.

We can know God's will and maintain trust in his help, if we are familiar with the trajectories of his Word.

The good news of the Bible is not that we are not worms, but that God helps worms who trust him.

There is no necessary connection between age and wisdom, or youth and folly. Wisdom comes from the Lord and is offered to all ages.

If God undertakes to work for us, he cannot fail. He will succeed in providing all the services we need.

Every Christian has received a gift from God which he is responsible to use for the good of the church and for the glory of God.

God will fight against us and clog the joy of our lives until we return with our whole heart to him. For his purpose is to be God alone in the midst of his people.

Every staff on which we try to lean in our pride will snap and pierce us through. One refuge will be secure: God.

Conversion isn't just changing your mind but exchanging the love of comfort for the love of goodness and justice.

In order to be acclaimed Messiah and Lord, the Son of God had to come, defeat the enemy, and lead his people out of bondage in triumph over sin and Satan and death. And that he did on Good Friday and Easter.

Would I gain my life before a holy God if I died tonight? Am I ready to take my stand in the divine courtroom and hear the Judge pass an eternal sentence on me?

The violent nation will not boast forever. Very soon the recompense will come, and after that all the nations will render an account to God.

When we make disciples, we bid people to come and die to their old, destructive ways and to live for Jesus, who loved them and gave himself for them.

The belly of a fish hardly seems like salvation. But it was.

Nothing you do is a trifle if you do it in the name of God. He will shake heaven and earth to fill your labor with splendor.

The fountain of forgiveness has been opened for you. And if you cleanse yourself through faith in that fountain, all the subsequent promises to God's people are yours.

God uses little towns and youngest sons and slingshots to magnify his glory by contrast, to show that he is not the least dependent on human glory or greatness or achievement.

Christ came at Christmas to build a bridge across the chasm of sin to eternal life, but the name of the bridge is purity. The only way to eternal life is along the path of sanctification.

The point of Hosea is that God exalts his mercy by not giving up on his promiscuous wife.

The essence of lukewarmness is the statement, "I need nothing." The lukewarm are spiritually self-satisfied.

Jesus makes it clear that eternal life hangs on whether we are ready when he comes.

The freest people in the world are those who submit most fully to the authority of Christ in Scripture.

There is one, and only one, gospel. It is therefore astonishing--and tragic--to turn away from it and lose both God and his grace.

To try to explain the change from Paul's pre-conversion persecution to his post-conversion passion for the gospel merely by the work of men is to grasp at a straw.

Very few people today stand up and praise the unity and coherence of truth.

When you finally hear and believe the drumbeat of the gospel, the rhythm of your step changes. There is a life in step with the gospel, and there is a life out of step with the gospel.

The transgression against God is to presume that you can climb your way up a ladder of morality into his favor.

The essential mark of a Christian is not how far you have progressed in sanctification, but on what you are relying to get there.

The central concern of your life is to ensure that you are a child of Abraham.

Though arrogance and rage assail, conspiracy will not prevail.

Our English word "hosanna" comes from a Greek word "hosanna" which comes from a Hebrew phrase hoshiya na.

It is a supreme irony that the people at the cross should look on the dying Savior and mock him with their own misunderstanding of this saying.

If your life is flat, empty, without exhilaration, without significance, without a single and fulfilling orientation, it is because you do not see the risen Christ for who he really is.

When Christ experienced the curse of the law on the cross it was not his own but ours.

It would be terribly wrong to say that the Mosaic law was opposed in its teaching to the Abrahamic covenant.

If we don't understand why the law was given, we can kill ourselves with it.

When you entrust yourself to Christ you honor him, and he would be denying himself to turn you away.

If Satan can't get you to disobey God's commands, then he'll try to make you obey them with the wrong spirit.

We are freed from the burden of the law when we are given the power to fulfill it from within. And that happens when Christ is formed in us.

For Paul, the experience of freedom is not icing on the cake of Christianity. Freedom in Christ is Christianity.

Your enjoyment of freedom is much more important to God than many of the day-to-day decisions that fill us with so much concern.

Being a loving person is absolutely essential to being saved, because the faith which saves by its very essence works through love.

Freedom flows forth in love just as surely as a bubbling spring flows forth in a mountain stream.

A Christian is not a person who experiences no bad desires. A Christian is a person who is at war with those desires by the power of the Spirit.

People who bear the fruit of the Spirit know they are worthy only of condemnation. They know that the only pay they can earn is the wrath of God.

If we really care about a person's ultimate welfare, we will confront them with their sin as well as comfort them in their trouble.

When you get your paycheck, do you look to the Spirit for how to use this money for God's kingdom?

The mindset of the new creation does not just agree that Christ died for sinners; it glories in the cross.

There are at least four reasons for why God has given work to mankind.

God is a perfect Christian Hedonist. It makes him happy to be God and to show us mercy.

We live in a superficially Christianized society where thousands of lost people think they do believe in Jesus.

When worship is reduced to a duty, it ceases to exist.

If you abandon the pursuit of full and lasting pleasure, you cannot love people or please God.

What you do with it—or desire to do with it—can make or break your happiness forever.

Marriage is a mystery—it contains and conceals a meaning far greater than what we see on the outside.

Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing.

When Satan huffs and puffs and tries to blow out the flame of your joy, you have an endless supply of kindling in the Word of God.

The challenge is great. God is greater. The rewards are a hundred times better than anything the world can offer.

The human heart hates the truth that creation teaches because it is too humbling.

The story of Noah and the flood is incomplete in itself. God still hates sin and no remedy was found. The story cries out for an epilogue.

We need a solid insight into the meaning of Christ's coming that will keep us sober in a world intoxicated by the love of things.

What was freely given under Moses was purchased by Christ.

When God makes a covenant he reveals his own job description and signs it.

The meaning of Christmas is that what is good and precious in your life need never be lost, and what is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed.

Revival happens when we see God majestic in holiness, and when we see ourselves disobedient dust.

Why do we have to pursue God, and how should it be done?

The means by which God intends to guard us for salvation is Christian community.

Strategies and actions to seek and save the lost must have high priority in the life of our church.

There is only one power that can break the spell of Satan, waken the armies of the Lord, and rout the god of this age—the power of the Holy Spirit.

If I'm so depraved that I can't do anything good, what do you expect me to do?

We need to know the experiences of Old Testament saints in order to understand the immensity of our privilege in these last days.

Bible confirms its divine origin again and again as it makes sense out of our experience in the real world and points the way to harmony.

If you long for the touch of God's Spirit on your life, give yourself daily to the reading of his Word.

The Holy Spirit may be shy, but he is also omnipotent.

Satan might do anything to prevent you from suffering.

Everything Jesus said and did was to make us trust him and imitate him. Everything he did is a ground for faith and a call to action.

None of us knows when our toying with sin will pass over into irrevocable hardness of heart. Very few people feel how serious sin is.