Look at the Book

Someday soon we get to exchange our crippled and lowly body for a glorious and heavenly one.

If you are Christ’s, you don’t belong here. This is not your home. Your citizenship is in heaven.

Even though Paul could outdo every Pharisee in law-keeping, he had no confidence in the law. But he had full confidence in the cross.

God’s enemies will face God’s eternal wrath. So who are these enemies of the cross, and how do I know I am not one of them?

The cross was designed by God to humble us. It reminds us that we need Christ’s blood to rescue us, and his power to strengthen us.

To love the world and all its riches may scratch an itch for a moment, but it will cost you everything in the end.

As hard as it may be, we must face the reality that hell exists and is promised to all of God’s enemies.

God does not call us to learn just from Paul’s teaching but also from his emotions. Do you weep over the lost like the apostle Paul?

The question is not if you are imitating, but who. We either imitate those who walk toward heaven or those who walk toward hell.

God has given you life to honor him, display him, and summon others to follow him.

Though God may take away, he has made a promise — and sealed it with his Son’s blood — that he will give back more.

We have a refuge in times of trouble, safety amid life’s storms. Only a fool curses the shelter and runs into the eye of the storm.

No suffering takes God by surprise. He alone is the perfect help in our pain. Should all around our soul give way, he then is all our hope and stay.

We cannot respond however we want when we suffer. Though we can grieve and mourn, if we never get to worship, we’ve stopped short.

If God stripped away our gifts — our income, our family, even our own health — would we curse him or bless his name?

Job remained steadfast in his suffering and has left us with a model for how to trust God with our pain.

No one starts as a mature Christian. Keep seeking God. Keep laboring to grow. And keep trusting that God will bring about our maturity.

God changes minds through ordinary means: Our gaze fixed upon his word, our knees bowed in prayer, and our time spent with our eternal family.

We cannot disagree with Christians in any way we want. God has given us boundaries and ways forward.

A heavenly mindset will not be lofty and self-righteous, but humble and God-dependent.

God wants us to grow up and leave behind childish ways. And he has done everything necessary to ensure it can happen.

Those who live for riches and the praise of man today will have hunger, mourning, and weeping tomorrow.

Do we err when we love others for the reward God offers us? No. Only those who labor for what God promises are rich enough to love others selflessly.

Those who follow Christ can weep now, can be poor and temporarily hated now, and yet remain wildly blessed because theirs is the coming kingdom.

If we are Christ’s disciples — whether poor, hungry, weeping, or persecuted — we are blessed.

All of the New Testament commandments are a call to become in experience what we are in Christ. And what we are in Christ is a new creation.

The Christian’s life on earth will always be walking along the narrow path. Living for sin is easy. Following Christ requires carrying a cross daily.

When we read commands and obligations, we are being summoned to become in experience what we are in Christ.

We are going to win this race. We are going to get the crown. Not because we are great runners, but because Christ has made us his own.

Pursue, strain forward, press on. God wants us to put all energy into making it to the end, not revisiting the life we had before we started the race.

Devote your whole life to this one pursuit: attaining the fullest possible experience of Christ imaginable.

God wants to give his children the assurance that they will be saved. But not the kind of assurance that ignores the warnings along the way.

The crown of life belongs to those who seek holiness, who hold fast to Christ, who finish the race. The crown of life belongs to Christians.

We do God no favors by excusing him from being sovereign over evil. But we can steal confidence from his children that nothing happens to them without a purpose.

Planning becomes sinful when we presume whatever we schedule will come to pass. Preface all of life with “If the Lord wills.”

God’s sovereignty means he reigns over every trial. And his love means that he intends them all for our good and his glory.

Don’t get discouraged if the fight against sin seems endless. The fight is necessary, the fight is winnable, and the fight will end.

Christian, God is working in your suffering. He is working Christlikeness, working trust, working to draw you closer to himself.

God gives us power — not to escape or avoid suffering — but to endure suffering while looking to Christ.

In this life, we will suffer. And through that suffering, we will know Christ in a way nothing else can provide.

Prosperity preachers not only twist and mangle the Bible’s message. They twist and mangle their hearers.

Faith is the experience of Christ as our surpassing worth and all else as rubbish by comparison.

When we gain Christ, we get a right standing before God that depends upon Christ and not ourselves.

A Christianity that never inconveniences us, never discomforts us, never costs anything, is not Christianity.

We can feel safe before a holy God and boast of a sure eternity. But we cannot do that by looking to ourselves.

The right parents, religious fervor, even good deeds will not save. We could have thousands of confidences, but all will fail unless it is Christ.

We act out miracles when we do ordinary tasks — attending a work meeting, eating dinner with our family, talking to a neighbor — relying on Christ.

Paul had an impressive résumé and a lifetime’s worth of accolades — but none of them could save him, and none of them could compete with gaining Christ.

A longing for heaven can’t help but eclipse longings for worldly pursuits because a longing for future glory produces in us a pursuit of glory today.

Our hope does not rest on ourselves, our neighbors, our politicians, or our kings, but on the one and only true and coming King.