Worse than You Think

When a fellow believer tells me how disenchanted and depressed they feel because they fell and did some bad things or don't even seem to have a heart for God anymore, I hope I can always remember to tell them this:

"Cheer up. You're much worse than you think."

The only thing that happened is that you discovered a little more of what already resides in your heart. But God has seen it all the whole time and still delivered up His Son for you.

The power of the Gospel is not in it's ability to make us feel good about ourselves or minimize our sin. It is in its ability to slay the old Adam with the truth of our foolish condition and create in us a man of faith, who doesn't live for himself but for Him who died and rose from the dead for him.

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My Crutch

It's interesting that one of the criticisms of non-religious folks is that we're using "religion" as a "crutch." Years ago, I would have become defensive and argued at the idea, but today I happily admit that Jesus is like a crutch but so much more. Why the change of heart? Often we're tempted to think that our spiritual walk with God is a lot like physical therapy for person recovering from a crippling injury. When many of us first come to believe, we imagine we're like someone who just awakened from a horrible accident and received the diagnosis that our legs don't work. We rely heavily on God, especially at first, like a recovering man would with crutches or a walker. And we imagine that as we work our spiritual muscles, as we do our disciplines and try hard to be good people, as we do more spiritual therapy, we get stronger. God lets us walk through some hard times too, perhaps, and that gives us the extra push to work out a little hard...

Abandoned to the God who Brings Low

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths." (Proverbs 3:5-6) If we were to compile a list of short Bible verses that encapsulate the life of the believer, this would surely make that list. But this kind of total trust is not natural to us. In some ways, the longer we walk on this earth, the better mechanisms we develop to try to handle the trials of life on our own. Often, it is ironically our God-given strengths that we employ to this end. But where we place our trust is what we ultimately look to as "god", even if that god is self. In his Small Catechism, Luther said, "A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart." For me, one of the biggest areas I struggle with trusting God i...

Law and Gospel Distinction Example

Below is an example of how the proper distinction between Law and Gospel is both practical and pastoral. Chesterton's quote "We fear men so much because we fear God so little. One fear cures another," is true, for all I understand. I remember reading a whole book on this subject called "When People are Big and God is Small." I was desperate to find a solution to what I was painfully experiencing, which some had diagnosed (and which I self-diagnosed from reading too many internet articles) as "fear of man." I remember as I began reading the book, I was excited. Many things written in the book resonated with me, and I had some hope. But as I approached the end of the book, my countenance and hope had fallen. Why? In retrospect, I believe it's because though I had hoped for a solution, something I can do to change this, to free myself, and the truth is that the book was long on diagnosis and very short on a useful prescripti...

Mathetes

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