Doesn’t theology divide us? Shouldn’t we put it aside so we can be united in Christ?
Only if you really believe that all division is to be avoided at absolutely all cost. I don’t see that goal anywhere in Scripture. When Paul was calling out the Corinthians for the divisions in their church, he made a distinction between functional unity and theological unity.

In 1 Corinthians 11, he said this, “When you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.” Paul wanted the Corinthians to be united in the things they did together, but he recognized that humans are sinful and weak, and have limited perspectives.

So there have to be factions – divisions – among us so that we can challenge each other about what it means to know God and follow God.  Eventually the genuine ones will shine through.

Why do we need more theology, when we already don’t apply most of what we know?
“Give me 5 steps to follow on how to have a better family… how to have a better prayer life… how to have less stress… And it would help me remember if the first letter of each step lines up to form an acrostic.”

That’s the pragmatic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-rubbah-slippah-straps approach to Christianity. But the clear teaching throughout Scripture is that the things you do flow from the things you believe.

Peter wrote this: “May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence,” (2 Peter 1:2-3).

You can’t get to be more godly unless you know God. You can’t know God unless you know things about God. If you want to do the right things, you need to have the right beliefs.

For a long time, we’ve heard statistics that say born-again Christians aren’t any different from the world around us when it comes to our morality. Our divorce rate is the same as the rest of the world. Our teens are having premarital sex at the same rate than the rest of the world (even higher, according to some surveys!)

But finally a few years ago, George Barna decided to tweak the survey a little bit. Instead of just asking people if they were an evangelical, born-again Christian, he asked them a few questions about what they believe. His goal was to separate out the people who hold a biblical theology. The people who believe that Jesus is the way, truth, life and no one comes to the Father except through him, and also believe that all Scripture is inspired by God and is inerrant and authoritative and gives absolute truth.

What he found was that this group lives a lot differently than the world:

Among the more intriguing lifestyle differences were the lesser propensity for those with a biblical worldview to gamble (they were eight times less likely to buy lottery tickets and 17 times less likely to place bets); to get drunk (three times less likely); and to view pornography (two times less common). They were also twice as likely to have discussed spiritual matters with other people in the past month and twice as likely to have fasted for religious reasons during the preceding month. While one out of every eight adults who lack a biblical worldview had sexual relations with someone other than their spouse during the prior month, less than one out of every 100 individuals who have such a worldview had done so.

So Peter was right! What you do flows from what you believe. When Christians fail to apply the truth they know, the problem isn’t that they know too much. The problem is that they just don’t believe it.

Many people have questions about why doctrine is important. Here are a few people have asked me:

If God is big, and we’re so small, how could we ever really understand him?
Most people like to sound nice and humble, and this question sounds like a nice, humble thing to ask. It isn’t. G.K. Chesterton saw this coming 100 years ago, and said, “What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. . . . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”

It sounds humble to say we can’t really understand God, but it’s actually the epitome of pride. What you’re really saying to God is, “I don’t think you’re wise enough and powerful enough to reveal yourself to us in a way we can understand, so I’m not even going to try to understand you.”

You’re saying, “All those people who think they can understand God are wrong. I’m the only person who really understands the truth, and that’s the fact that God is un-understandable!”

Why can’t we just let the seminary professors worry about theology?
Everyone does theology, whether they know it or not. Everyone goes through a process to decide what they believe and don’t. That’s theology. The only question is whether it’s good theology or bad theology.

Everyone has an idea in their head of what God is like. Maybe he’s the ultra-demanding boss in the sky who’s never satisfied with you. Or maybe he’s the nice old uncle who always gives you a pass when you mess up, “Hey, nobody’s perfect! Just believe in yourself more! Always next time!” Maybe he’s the deadbeat dad who’s always somewhere else and never has time for you.

Whatever you think about God, mankind, and the world is your theology. It can be either consistent and biblical theology or it can be theology that you pieced together from things you’ve experienced, things you heard from a pastor on the radio, things in the latest book you read, and things Oprah said on yesterday’s show.

C.S. Lewis described our natural tendency well: “People are content to have a dozen different incompatible philosophies dancing around inside their head.”  That’s bad theology.

Isn’t theology a waste of time? Shouldn’t we be focusing our energy on getting people saved?
“We’re supposed to be loving other people and leading them to Christ. If my head is stuck in a theology book, how is that going to help my neighbor come to Jesus?”

A legitimate question. I met plenty of guys in seminary who were there because they wanted to avoid real life. They wanted to be monks and surround themselves with books by dead guys so they wouldn’t have to be bothered by people who were alive.

But it doesn’t always have to be either/or. Either people and ministry or theology and doctrine. Just look at Paul.

Paul loved people. He told the Philippians that he thanked God every time he thought about them… that he held them in his heart. Paul loved ministry. He was always lying awake at night figuring out how to be all things to all people so that by ALL MEANS he could save some. And Paul loved theology. You just have to read a few of his paragraph-long run-on-sentences to know that this stuff was on his mind all the time, and he couldn’t keep it from exploding out. Read some passages like Romans 8, and you can almost hear him trying to catch his breath between sentences.

Evangelism and theology go hand-in-hand.

Once a week, I get together with a small group of Harbor guys to go through Grudem’s Systematic Theology. Most times our conversation is fast-paced and exciting. Sometimes even explosive. But on some less-spicy topics it can be a slog to get through the material. I can almost hear the question in the back of the guys’ heads because it’s already in the back of mine: “Tell me why we’re doing this again?”

In a pragmatic, instant-gratification age, it can be tough to see the value in things that aren’t either a) immediately useful or b) immediately entertaining. Theology doesn’t always meet either of those criteria. Many people think it never does. Why can’t we just love God and let the details work themselves out?

Paul tackles a similar question in Romans 10. He’s been talking about the people of Israel, and how they missed the mark because they pursued God their own way. He says, “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

That’s a scary thought. It’s possible to have a zeal for God and still not be saved because you don’t have knowledge!

And Paul knows about zeal. He says in Galatians 1 that before he was saved by Jesus he was “advancing in Judaism beyond many of his own age,” and that was because he was “so extremely zealous.”

It’s possible to have a passion for God, and still not find him because you don’t have knowledge. It’s not that Paul is putting zeal against knowledge, because just a little later, in chapter 12, he’ll tell the Romans, “Do not be slothful in zeal, but be fervent in spirit.”

He wants us to have such a fire for the Lord that it gives us chicken skin. But that passion has to be guided by the right beliefs, or else our zeal can become a dangerous thing. So dangerous that it can keep us from being saved.

Theology matters because lives depend on it. Lives like the one in this video, a man who couldn’t find any answers to his theological questions in the churches he visited, so instead turned to Islam.

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N.D. Wilson, in Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl:

We sat around a table, nursing two dollars in liquid form and eating free cheese. My Catholic friend was talking about professors. An atheist was complaining about parking. Another atheist, a girl, was sitting thoughtfully, staring at us, at the “believers” outed in various seminar discussions.

When the conversation lagged, she asked her question.

“Do you think I’m going to Hell?”

“Yes,” my Catholic friend said without hesitation. He looked around. “I do.”

People laughed, not because it was a joke, but because he was serious and unembarrassed. He was never embarrassed – an attribute I admired.

She looked at me and leaned forward, waiting for the Protestant version.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t you want to?”

“What do you mean?” She made an excellent questioning face – cocked head and eyebrows behind glasses. It was perfect for the classroom. “Why would I want to go to Hell?”

“God is who He is. Do you want to be with Him?”

Hell is voluntary. Would you like to go?

Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald were on the ground in Haiti this week, and brought back this video report:

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Mark Driscoll writes this:

The devastation there is more horrendous than you can possibly imagine. Within the first few hours on the ground to research the state of the church, we saw multiple collapsed churches with members’ decomposed bodies trapped inside…we saw a teenage boy shot in the head just feet away from a Christian seminary that was housing 5,000 refugees, most of whom were children; and we watched a twenty-four-year-old Christian man pull the body of his twenty-six-year-old brother, a worship leader, from the rubble.

We made great contacts on the front lines in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and invite you to send support to help our brothers and sisters in Christ.

You can learn more and give at Churches Helping Churches.

Paul says this in 2 Corinthians 9:

Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully … He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. (2 Corinthians 9:6,10)

When we “sow seed” through our generosity to others, God promises to multiply our generosity back to us for the purpose of sowing more and being even more generous. A powerful story passed along to me by a missionary friend in Africa illustrates how Paul’s original audience in the first-century church might have understood this truth:

I was always perplexed by Psalm 126 until I went to the Sahel, that vast stretch of savanna more than four thousand miles wide just under the Sahara Desert. In the Sahel, all the moisture comes in a four month period: May, June, July, and August. After that, not a drop of rain falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up the dust and throw it thousands of feet into the air. It then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets inside your watch and stops it. The year’s food, of course, must all be grown in those four months. People grow sorghum or milo in small fields.

October and November…these are beautiful months. The granaries are full, the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day. The sorghum is ground between two stones to make flour and then a mush with the consistency of yesterday’s Cream of Wheat. The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then pop it into their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their stomachs so they can sleep.

December comes, and the granaries start to recede. Many families omit the morning meal. Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating two meals a day.

By February, the evening meal diminishes. The meal shrinks even more during March and children succumb to sickness. You don’t stay well on half a meal a day.

April is the month that haunts my memory. In it you hear the babies crying in the twilight. Most of the days are passed with only an evening cup of gruel.

Then, inevitably, it happens. A six- or seven-year-old boy comes running to his father one day with sudden excitement. ‘daddy! Daddy! We-ve got grain!” he shouts.

“Son, you know we haven’t had grain for weeks.

“Yes, we have!” the boy insists. “Out in the hut where we keep the goats’there’s a leather sack hanging up on the wall-I reached up and put my hand down in there’daddy, there’s grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour, and tonight our tummies can sleep!’

The father stands motionless.

“Son, we can’t do that,? he softly explains. ‘that’s next year’s seed grain. It’s the only thing between us and starvation. We’re waiting for the rains, and then we must use it.’

The rains finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does the most unreasonable thing imaginable. Instead of feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt!

Why? Because he believes in the harvest.

When the tsunami hit Southeast Asia, I heard God did it because it was a holiday when Hindus were worshiping the ocean god. When the hurricane hit New Orleans, I heard God did it because they tolerated Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras. When the earthquake hit Haiti this week, I heard God did it because their ancestors made a deal with the devil 200 years ago.

When disaster struck Jerusalem, here’s how Jesus responded:

“Those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:4-5)

This isn’t a time to look for specks in others’ eyes. It’s a time for us to pull out the logs in our own, give to solid organizations (like our sister church in Port-Au-Prince and others arriving soon to minister there), and pray that God will sovereignly intervene in the man-made disaster that preceded the natural disaster – so that those who survive in Haiti don’t soon suffer the same fate as their neighbors.

These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. (Deuteronomy 6:6-7)

That’s tough to do when your family is going a million miles an hour in a thousand different directions, like ours seems to be sometimes. That’s why Deuteronomy says we need to be diligent about setting aside time when we can intentionally teach our kids about God’s glory and grace. Sure, it can happen naturally while we’re walking “by the way” and driving in the car. But in order for them to receive the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:26-27) and not just the topics that they happen to bring up at dinner or the Bible stories we happen to flip to at bedtime, we need to be systematic.

That’s why I’m extremely grateful for Training Hearts, Teaching Minds by Starr Meade. Based on a modern version of the time-tested Westminster Catechism, it takes families through the major doctrines of biblical faith. Every day for a week we ask our kids the same question (First week: “What is the primary purpose of man?”), and every day, through a short Bible passage and discussion time, they learn the answer (“To glorify God and enjoy him forever.”) We spend 15 minutes at breakfast or dinner learning, discussing, and praying together. Even our 4-year-old can follow along.

Each family at Harbor received a copy of the book for Christmas. If you’re not a Harborite, order a copy for your family, and commit to diligently teaching them. You’ll be blessed!

Now that our church is meeting closer to downtown in Kaimuki, we will be much more aware of the needs around us (there are plenty of needs in East Oahu, it’s just that people there are better at hiding them!). Over the next year, we will be pursuing some major new ministry initiatives to care for the poor and oppressed  in Honolulu, starting with the homeless neighbors our community groups have been building relationships with over the past year.

Yesterday, I preached out of 2 Corinthians 8, where Paul challenges us to be generous toward those in need. But why should we care about poor people? Because it’s our duty? Because it’s tradition?

I offered five biblical reasons why Christians should proactively and sacrificially care for needy people:

1. Because God himself loves the poor.
In James 2, it tells us not to ignore the poor people in our church and show preference toward rich people just because we might gain something from them. And the reason James gives us is this: ”Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?”

God disproportionately calls poor people to faith. He values the people everyone else tries to ignore.

2. Because Jesus modeled life among the poor.
Paul says in 2 Corinthians 8, “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” He went from spiritual riches to rags so we could go from rags to spiritual riches. That’s a model for us to embody.

3. Because God demands justice for the oppressed.
If you read the Old Testament prophets, they say two things over and over again: stop doing evil, and start caring for needy people.

• Isaiah 1: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.”
• Jeremiah 7: “If you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one with another, 6 if you do not oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, 7 then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers forever.”

4. Because physical poverty reminds us of our spiritual poverty
You can see this in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It was probably a sermon he preached many different times in many different places, and he tweaked it a little bit each time he preached it. And so we have 2 different versions recorded: one in Matthew 5 and one in Luke 6.

In Matthew’s version Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But in Luke he simply says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” In Matthew, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” In Luke, it’s just, “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.”

There’s a parallel between physical and spiritual need, so being around people who are physically poor and needy and dependent on the generosity of others is going to remind us that we’re spiritually poor and needy, and dependent on the generosity of God and his grace.

I think that’s why Jesus commands us in Luke 14, “When you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” That’s because their presence will remind us that we’re spiritually poor, and crippled, and lame, and blind. When God invites us to feast at his table it’s not because of anything we’ve done, and it’s not because we have anything we can repay him with.

5. Because it proves your godly grief
In 2 Corinthians 7, Paul tells us that there are times when grief is a good thing. When we see our sin, and we’re grieved by it to the point of repenting and turning back to God, that’s godly grief (as opposed to worldly grief, which is when we grieve the consequences of our sin and change nothing). When we experience godly grief, then Paul says we’ll have a zeal and a longing for holiness that will result in visible fruit in our lives.

And the first example of this kind of fruit is what Paul mentions in chapter 8: compassion for the needy and oppressed.

(Continued from part 1)

Most of us who live in Hawaii have racked up a whole lot of frequent flier miles going back and forth to the mainland. But with all of those flights, you’ve never gone up to the cockpit, knocked on the door, and demanded to interview the pilot about his training and experience flying this particular kind of airplane. You’ve never gone down to the tarmac to interview the mechanic, and make sure he put enough fuel in the plane to make it all the way to the mainland.

You’ve probably been to a lot of restaurants. But you’ve never barged into the kitchen and asked to see the expiration dates on the mayonnaise jars. You’ve never asked your waiter if he really washed his hands the last time he was in the bathroom.

In all of these situations, you’re putting your life in someone else’s hands. You’re living by faith. But it’s not blind faith and positive thinking.

You’re putting your trust in your airline pilot because you know he’s had to fly thousands of hours before he could even come close to getting you in the air. He’s proven himself over and over again, and if he can keep himself awake and his laptop closed, then there’s a 99.99% chance he’ll get you where you need to go without incident.

It’s the same in our relationship with God. He’s proven himself, first by his creation:

By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. (Hebrews 11:3)

He also proved himself in the lives of people throughout history:

By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. (Hebrews 11:4)

Cain just went and picked up whatever old rotten fruit he could find laying around, and threw it onto the altar to God. But Abel sacrificed the best animals he had, out of faith. Now here’s the tough part – even though he had faith, Abel still got killed.

That’s the fatal blow to the idea that faith means believing that everything’s just going to be OK. I’ve been to leprosy villages in China, where people have been shunned by their families and disowned by the government. Try telling a 12-year-old girl who’s missing her nose and hands, and will probably die alone, that everything will be all right if she just thinks positive!

Faith isn’t just some sunshine dream that everything will be all good. It’s a lot harder than that. Faith means believing that no matter what happens, God’s still in charge. And he’s still good. And he still loves us.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1

If you just took this verse all by itself, you could slap it on any Hallmark card in the world, as many people have. By itself, this verse could make you believe that faith is just positive thinking. If you just hope for the best, God will make sure everything turns out OK.

I have a friend who went to a church where they believed this wholeheartedly: if you just have enough faith, God will give you everything you ask for. In a small group one night, he made the mistake of making a joke about how his hair was thinning out. The small-group leader stopped the entire discussion, and rebuked him. “Don’t say that! You need to rebuke that spirit of baldness and claim God’s victory over your scalp!”

God may want to do a lot of things in your life, but I think styling your hair is at the bottom of his list. Faith isn’t the hope that God will give you everything you want. It’s the unshakable belief that God is in charge no matter what happens to you, and it’s based on solid evidence, not wispy hope.

When the author of Hebrews talks about conviction of things not seen, he’s using an academic term. The word for “conviction” could be defined as a proof or a verification.

Remember high school geometry, when you had to prove that the side of this triangle was the same length as the side of that triangle? You said to yourself, “I’m looking at ‘em right here, and they’re the same length! Why do I have to go through 38 steps of logic? Can’t I just take out my ruler and measure ‘em?”

But your teacher wanted you to be able to evaluate something by taking the evidence around it and coming to a logical conclusion, so that even if you never physically saw the triangles, you could still prove it.

That’s the idea here. You can’t see God. You can’t see the things he’s going to do in your life. You can’t see the rewards or costs there might be in following him. But you’ve seen the evidence all around you that God is powerful, and also that he’s good and loving. Faith is being sure of things that cannot be known for sure, if we depend only on our eyes and ears and nose and mouth.

More tomorrow.

As our church enters the New Year, we have a single resolution: to understand the gospel better by allowing it to seep down and influence every area of our lives. Through every relationship, every pursuit, every conversation, every task, and every free moment, we want to become more aware of the three things that make up the gospel:

1. The greatness of God’s glory
2. The greatness of our sin
3. The greatness of God’s grace that bridges the two

We’ve reworked a very helpful diagram from The Gospel-Centered Life by Bob Thune to show how this works over the course of our lives:

This shows the life of someone who’s walking closely with God over time. When you’re saved by God, you don’t see much of God’s holiness, and you don’t see much of your sin. But over time, God gives you more experiences like he gave Isaiah in Isaiah 6:1-7. You see more of his glory and his holiness. You see more about him that’s awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping.

In the light of his glory you see more of your own sinfulness, like turning on the lights in a room and seeing the cockroaches scatter. You see beyond the obvious external sins, and you start seeing the heart-level ugliness inside. And the more you see how far apart you are from God, the bigger the cross becomes. You see how incredible God’s grace is, poured out on the cross to bridge the gap between his holiness and your sinfulness. And that’s how the gospel grows and bears fruit in your life like Paul talks about in Colossians 1:6. You start accepting more of God’s grace, and the result is that you start looking more like God.

But there’s a problem. We’re sinful, so most of us don’t always live that way.

We don’t always grow in our awareness of God’s glory. We’re happy to have him as our copilot, just there to back us up when we need him. And we don’t always grow in our awareness of our sin. We keep on doing the same things we’ve always done, without ever stopping to ask ourselves whether we’re pleasing God or not.

And so the cross just stays small. We don’t appreciate the grace of God very much, so it doesn’t affect us very much. We stay the same.

The theologian Tertullian, who lived 150 years after Christ, said, “Just as Christ was crucified between two thieves, so this doctrine of justification is ever crucified between two opposite errors.” According to Tim Keller (PDF), he meant that there are two errors we fall into that pull us away from the gospel. Either you can diminish God’s glory, or you can inflate your own holiness.

There are words for those two thieves: Legalism and Relativism.

Legalists inflate their own holiness. They see God as holy and just, and so they try to come up with ways to make themselves just as holy. They like to have a lot of rules to live by, and if they can successfully follow the rules, then they feel pretty good about themselves. If you read your Bible 30 minutes a day, then you’re holy. If you go to church every week, even when you’re on vacation, then you’re holy. If you can go a whole month without looking at any dirty websites, then you’re holy. They don’t need God’s grace, because they’ve got all their rules instead!

Relativists diminish God’s holiness. They like see God as the nice, loving old guy in the sky, who doesn’t set too many expectations. They might see sin, but it’s mostly in society at large. If they see it in themselves, it’s a result of their exposure to the society. They emphasize freedom and love and grace, but since they don’t have a proper view of God’s holiness, they don’t really have a proper view of grace. Their idea of grace is just niceness. It’s still pretty small.

We have thieves on each side of the gospel, and both of them keep the cross small. Both of them keep the gospel from bearing fruit in our lives. And we allow both of them to do it all the time:

• When you go to church, the thief of legalism will try to make you deadly serious in your worship, to make sure you worship our holy God in complete holiness and earn his favor. The thief of relativism will try to make you casual and flippant in your worship, since God isn’t too far above you anyway. But if you’re living in the gospel, you’ll be blown away by God’s holiness and your sin, and you’ll worship out of sheer joy for the grace he’s lavished on you.
• When you’re going through a really tough time in life, the thief of legalism will try to tell you that you don’t deserve it because you’ve been faithful to God. You’ll end up bitter because God isn’t being fair. The thief of relativism will try to tell you that it’s OK to do whatever it takes to get out of the tough time… lie, cheat, steal, whatever. God won’t mind. But if you’re living in the gospel, you’ll see God’s glory and your sin, and you’ll see how God is using the tough time to make you more like him.
• When you meet a homeless guy on the street, the thief of legalism will try to tell you that he’s getting what he deserves, since he obviously hasn’t been as faithful to God as you have. The thief of relativism will try to tell you that he’s a victim of society, and he just needs a handout, not more religion pushed on him. But the gospel will tell you that you’re just as spiritually poor as he is physically poor, and you’re both in need of God’s grace, so you won’t have any problem giving him what he needs, physically and spiritually.

The gospel changes everything! Absolutely everything. So as we start this New Year, I’m praying that God will help us see the greatness of his glory, the greatness of our sin, and the greatness of his grace in absolutely everything.