Man Was Made To Lead

Salvation Is Not Some Felicitous State To Which We Can Lift Ourselves By Our Own Bootstraps After The Contemplation Of Sufficiently Good Examples. It Is An Utterly New Creation Into Which We Are Brought By Our Death In Jesus' Death And Our Resurrection In His. It Comes Not Out Of Our Own Best Efforts, However Well-inspired Or Successfully Pursued, But Out Of The Shipwreck Of All Human Efforts Whatsoever.

The Life Of Grace Is Not An Effort On Our Part To Achieve A Goal We Set Ourselves. It Is A Continually Renewed Attempt Simply To Believe That Someone Else Has Done All The Achieving That Is Needed And To Live In Relationship With That Person, Whether We Achieve Or Not. If That Doesn't Seem Like Much To You, You're Right: It Isn't. And, As A Matter Of Fact, The Life Of Grace Is Even Less Than That. It's Not Even Our Life At All, But The Life Of That Someone Else Rising Like A Tide In The Ruins Of Our Death.

The World Looks As If It Has Been Left In The Custody Of Trolls.

He Comes To Us In The Brokenness Of Our Health, In The Shipwreck Of Our Family Lives, In The Loss Of All Possible Peace Of Mind, Even In The Very Thick Of Our Sins. He Saves Us In Our Disasters, Not From Them. He Emphatically Does Not Promise To Meet Only The Odd Winner Of The Self-improvement Lottery. He Meets Us All In Our Endless And Inescapable Losing.

For All Its Rooted Loveliness, The World Has No Continuing City Here; It Is An Outlandish Place, A Foreign Home, A Session In Via To A Better Version Of Itself-and It Is Our Glory To See It So And To Thirst Until Jerusalem Comes Home At Last. We Were Given Appetites, Not To Consume The World And Forget It, But To Taste Its Goodness And Hunger To Make It Great.