The Wake-Up Call

Our God is on a mission to encourage us, not so much because we need encouragement but because we have a massive mission in front of us.

God's love is no sentimental or emotive feeling—which can be devastated by the perpetrators of wickedness, or snuffed out by the disappointments of life.

"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

There is only one upside of this kind of suffering and hardship—desperation.

It is an easy thing to believe in God. It is another thing entirely to believe God. The former is an affirmation of faith. The latter is faith itself.

As we encourage one another, we learn to speak to one another in the voice of God in the humble authority of Jesus in the loving power of the Holy Spirit.

The ongoing Holy Spirit chemotherapy for the deceitful sin cancer of an unbelieving heart is thick encouragement.

I have become convinced that the greatest and most singular need people who want to wake up, follow Jesus, and become imbued with his supernatural presence and power in the everyday world—which is holy love—is courage.

God's love is no sentimental or emotive feeling—which can be devastated by the perpetrators of wickedness, or snuffed out by the disappointments of life.

Entrust your life completely, constantly, and unreservedly to Jesus.

We must move beyond the threshold of the Christian life and begin constructing a soul, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the new life God has put within.

Eternal life means freedom from sin and ultimate deliverance from death.

Discipleship is not preparation for eternal life; it’s practicing eternal life.

We know that we know that we know we are not created for death. We are created for life, and not only endless life but eternal life.

We can simply stand on the testimony, and stand we must—not with our gospel guns raised to shoot but, as humble lovers of the truth, ready to quietly serve or boldly speak up as the calling of faith requires.

This psalm sees the whole trajectory, from justification to sanctification and, indeed, even envisions that final day when we are delivered from not only the guilt and power of sin, but even the presence of sin.

Give us the discernment to recognize the first faint whisper of any teaching that departs from your truth, your ways, or your will.

There is no such thing as a trouble-free life. There is only the promise of overcoming.

The promise—for everyone who believes—is to overcome.

In order for my love to grow deeper in the ways of the love of God, my perception, interpretation, and understanding of the truth must deepen.

The presence of Jesus, which is to say the presence of holy love, drives out fear by displacing it.

It is far more important to have clarity than certainty.

We all have a tendency to try to refashion God in an image of our own making, but the God of biblical revelation is the God whom we will someday face.

Faith is the mysterious convergence of crisis and process and demonstration built on three corresponding kinds of evidence: empirical, experiential, and experimental.

Love is made complete when the gladness of the giver gets expressed through the generosity of the recipient to release the gift forward to yet another.

The big problem is not that we are in the world. The problem is the world is in us.

It all comes back to Jesus. Jesus is the Truth. If we don’t comprehend and confess the truth about the Truth, we are sitting ducks for false teachers.

This path of persistent confession is the only pathway by which we are set free of the condemnation we heap on ourselves.

Truth is ever asking the question, Is our inward reality of love becoming the outward activity of love?

The psalmist didn’t fully know how God would redeem him from death, but he knew that if we were united to an eternal God, then he must have a plan for us.

The big issue isn’t whether we are helping people in need; it’s whether our hearts are truly open to those we are helping.

Nothing is more beautiful or winsome or powerful than people laying down their interests and agendas and needs and desires for the best interests of others.

In other words, loving one another is not the condition for salvation but the evidence of it.

John is calling us to aim at a particular variety of love, to aspire to a way of life—eternal life—here and now. Eternal life is life on another level. It’s life in the light of love.

I’m tired of watered-down faith. I want the not-from-concentrate Christian faith. I want “Simply Jesus.”

If sin has lost its power, maybe the problem is we have not taken up our power.

This psalm foreshadows the great vision of the new covenant, where men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation will be adopted into the family of God.

I think the biggest problem we Christians have with sin is our lack of belief that it can be overcome.

Lord Jesus, teach me this way of beholding, of seeing beyond sight and hearing beyond sound.

One of the marks of a maturing follower of Jesus is a humble boldness born of a deep inner conviction about what is true, which consequently gives one discernment about what is false.

We have one job in the life hid with Christ in God—and that is to show up, every day, day after day, and rehearse the truth we have heard from the beginning.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is totally exclusive, yet it is radically inclusive. Anyone who believes gets in on it.

To grow in maturity as a follower of Jesus means to grow in the anointing.

This psalm foreshadows the great vision of the new covenant, where men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation will be adopted into the family of God.

The metric for Christian maturity is not competent skills or great gifts, but humility and holy love.

When you boil it all down, the problem is never out there in the so-called world. The problem is in here, in the broken world of my inmost self.

The love of God could bring them into relationships with other people in such a way that their lives exuded the joy-filled, holy love of God, which is the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ that can take a broken world and transform it into a new creation.

To the extent that I am not actively putting my self-interest aside and serving and helping and looking out for the best interests of the people around me, I am walking around in the darkness, lost as I can be.

When Jesus taught his disciples the meaning of love, he didn’t render an interpretation. He became the interpretation.

Love is not about playing nice. We are talking about nothing less than taking on the supernatural nature of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can live a new life.