God's Love for us

The Ministry of Jesus Christ Three years. That is approximately how long the public ministry of Jesus Christ lasted. Three years in which He traveled the dusty roads of first century Palestine, taught in synagogues and on hillsides, healed the sick and cast out demons, fed crowds in the wilderness, walked on water and raised the dead. Three years in which He called twelve ordinary people to follow Him, formed them into the nucleus of a movement that would change the world, confronted the religious establishment of His day and ultimately gave His life as the culmination and the purpose of everything He had come to do. In those three years Jesus accomplished more than any other person who has ever lived. More books have been written about His life and teachings than about any other human being. More lives have been transformed by His example and His message than by any other force in human history. More civilizations have been shaped by His influence, for better and for worse, than by ...

The Birth of Jesus Christ Every year at Christmas the story is told again. The angel Gabriel visiting a young woman in Nazareth. A long journey to Bethlehem on a donkey. A stable because there was no room in the inn. Shepherds startled by angels in the night sky. Wise men following a star from the east. A manger where a baby slept. The story is so familiar, so deeply woven into the fabric of global culture, that it is possible to hear it a thousand times without ever being stopped in your tracks by the sheer staggering weight of what it is actually saying. Because what the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are describing is not primarily a touching story about a poor family and a humble beginning. They are describing the most extraordinary event in the history of the universe, the moment when the God who created everything, in whom all things hold together, through whom and for whom all things exist, became a human infant. The Creator entered His creation. The infinite became fini...

The Gifts of the Holy Spirit Every believer in Jesus Christ has been given a gift. Not a natural talent or a personality trait, though God uses those too, but a specific supernatural ability distributed by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of building up the body of Christ and advancing the work of God in the world. 1 Corinthians 12:7 states this with remarkable clarity and remarkable inclusiveness: "Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good." Each one. Not a select spiritual elite. Not only those with formal ministry training. Not only those who have been believers for many years. Each one who belongs to Christ has received at least one gift of the Holy Spirit. And yet one of the most consistently observed realities in the life of the church is that many believers have never seriously engaged with the question of what their spiritual gifts are, let alone discovered, developed and exercised them for the good of others. Many Christians know a...

The Fruits of the Holy Spirit Galatians 5:22-23 contains one of the most well-known passages in all of the New Testament, a nine-item list that has been memorized by Sunday school children, embroidered on cushions, painted on church walls and quoted in countless sermons across two thousand years of Christian history. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." Nine qualities. One Spirit. And a description of human character so beautiful, so complete and so far beyond what natural human effort can consistently produce that it functions simultaneously as the most inspiring vision of what a Christian can become and the most humbling reminder of how far short of that vision most of us fall in daily experience. But the fruit of the Spirit is far more than a list to memorize or a standard to be measured against. Understanding what these qualities actually are, where they come from, how they grow an...

The Forgiveness of Our Sins There is a weight that many people carry, sometimes for years, sometimes for a lifetime, that no human remedy can lift. It is not the weight of circumstance or loss or physical suffering though those are real and heavy in their own way. It is the weight of guilt, the deep, personal knowledge that we have done wrong, that we have hurt people who did not deserve it, that we have violated standards we ourselves believe in and that something in the moral fabric of the universe has been damaged by our choices and our failures. This weight is universal. Every human being who has ever lived has known some version of it. And into that universal human condition the Bible speaks one of the most extraordinary and most personally liberating words in all of human language: forgiven. Not excused. Not overlooked. Not explained away. Genuinely, completely, finally forgiven, the debt cancelled, the guilt removed, the relationship restored. The forgiveness of sins through J...