In his book “What’s so Amazing about Grace?”, Philip Yancy illustrates a point by referring to some German classes he had to take one summer. He wondered what would have happened if the registrar had come up to him and said, “Philip, we want you to study hard, learn German and take the test, but […]

The legalist that is in all of us believes that we have to earn God’s favor. We might never say it out loud, but our tendency is to feel like this. The two sons in the parable of the Prodigal Son also had that mentality. The first son, the Bible says, went to a far […]

When I read some of the Psalms that say things like “as the deer pants after the water brooks so my soul pants after you”1 or like “God you are my God, early will I seek you, my soul thirsts for you and my flesh longs for you like it was a dry and thirsty […]

In 1978 I worked as a cook at an all-night restaurant along I-5 in Red Bluff, CA. One morning around 7:30, I was headed home on my bicycle when I saw a man who was already drunk, sitting on the stairs in front of the post office. Suddenly, the word of the Lord came to […]

I have talked in this book about the supreme importance of love, and how love makes the Christian life not only possible but also easy to live. In this chapter I would like to reflect on the love God has for you. Lately I see a lot of people that worry about what God thinks […]

3) I want to be grateful. A grateful person generally is humble. One of the things I use to crush my pride is expressing gratitude out loud for things someone does for me. As a minister (servant) we of all people should be most grateful. If any good comes out of my ministry, whether it […]

I read an article a few years ago that chilled me to the core. It said that the majority of the pastors in the United States stop growing spiritually when they are about 45 years old. (How do they know this stuff?) It seems that pastors learn to do a job — how to counsel, […]

I was the perfect hypocrite. I read the Bible every day, prayed for half an hour in tongues and half an hour in English, fasted one day a week, tithed, evangelized, and went to every service in my church. Like many others who do all these things, I judged people. I compared them with myself […]

The legalist that lives in us has goals and dreams that are way too small to be from God. That is why we have to fight against the temptation to dream only of knowing the Bible and living a sin-free life. We have to go much further up and further in. Obviously, all of us […]

Although we are people who really want to please God, we still often commit three common errors. These arise because most of us are neither totally legalists nor do we totally walk in grace; we are a complicated combination of the two. The first mistake we make is when we come to the conclusion that […]