Christianity is never a mechanical thing. And the church is not a morality agency—it’s a regenerating agency. The real goal of the do’s and the don’ts in the Christian life is always character—growing into God’s holy people. The church does bring about moral behavior but, in a sense, as a byproduct. Because what the church is after is to turn peopl…

Whenever God turns to you, if you believe in him, all he sees when he looks at you is complete beauty and sweetness. Jesus Christ offered himself up and fulfilled all of the obligations we owe God, so he has completely satisfied God. God sees nothing and senses nothing but sweetness when he regards you. But you still live in a world twisted and bro…

If you look at the particulars Christian teachings, the particulars don’t look that different from many other ethical systems. The difference is that Christianity is never interested in moral behavior simply as moral behavior. In every instance, putting on the new self means to remember your identity. Being a Christian is ultimately about being mel…

Christianity has an amazing approach to lying and to anger that almost nobody else has. For truth-telling, it says truth must always be told with love. And for anger, it says, “Be ye angry, and sin not.” Paul doesn’t say, “Well if you get angry, it might be okay.” He says, “Be angry. Do it.” Very often it is wrong not to be angry. But then he turns…

A good test shows you what you really are, what’s really in you. If you’re in denial, the tests are devastating. If you’re dropping the ball, the tests are traps. Jesus says the only way you’re going to come through the tests of life is if you seek God. How are you doing right now? Are you going through and failing the little tests, and are you set…

In this passage, we finally get to a particular kind of prayer in which people are very interested: to the place where Jesus says prayer is a way to change our circumstances. Prayer makes a difference. You can come to God and say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” But notice this happens in the very middle of the Lord’s Prayer. It’s surrounded by…

I’ll say it consciously: this is our worst nightmare. More than anyone else in history, modern people believe we ought to have a good life and we ought to have some control over our lives. But Jesus says when you connect with God, you must pray, “Thy will be done.” This means the purpose of prayer is not that we would bend God’s will to meet ours, …

What does it mean to hallow? It’s a word virtually never used anymore in everyday English, but we don’t quite have an equivalent. To hallow something means to treat it as sacred and ultimate. It means to make something your ultimate concern, to make it the most important thing, to make it the most crucial thing, to make it the supreme beauty, the s…

Jesus doesn’t just point the way to God—rather, he is the way to God because he’s risen. And that means that for Christians, prayer is a unique, radically different process than it is for other religions and philosophies. Prayer is a rather universal thing, and there are many ways to pray. But Jesus says there are really two different bases on whic…

The Psalms is the divinely inspired prayer book, but when you open this prayer book, the first page is not a prayer. It’s a meditation on meditation. Meditation is not the same as studying the Bible. In studying the Bible you’re just learning information. Meditation takes what you’ve learned and does something with it. And according to the Psalms, …

The Lord’s Prayer is quite a workout. You’re asking for a lot of things: daily bread, deliver us from evil. But at the end, you rest in God. The last phrase in the Lord’s Prayer is, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever, amen.” Is that just a rhetorical flourish? After all, it doesn’t seem to be a prayer. But ancien…

We don’t see that envy is as terrible as it really is. Envy is wanting somebody else’s life. Do you know what that does? It sucks the joy out of the life you actually have. In Psalm 73, the psalmist is living as good a life as he can, and everything is going wrong. And on top of that, he sees a lot of other people who are corrupt and they’re having…

What if I told you there was a process and no matter how much you blew up your life, if you used this process, there would be a way to come out the other side whole? Well, here it is. It’s what the Bible calls repentance. You say, “You mean just saying I’m sorry?” But that reveals you don’t understand the power of this kind of prayer. This kind of …

We need every bit of help we can get to learn to pray, “Thy will be done,” because we’re going right into the teeth of our culture. The essence of American culture is the belief that the more free we are to decide for ourselves, the happier we’ll be. But Jesus Christ says every time you pray to God, you need to say to him, “Thy will be done.” That …

What does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come”? Jesus gave us his instruction on how to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s filled with concepts you need to know from the rest of the Bible. There are two places—Matthew 5 and Luke 6—where Jesus tells us a lot about the kingdom of God and the blessedness of the kingdom. I want to show you 1) what the …

Hallowed is an old English word that means to treat something as sacred. It means to be captivated, astonished, melted with grateful joy for who God is and what he has done. For many years, I felt I didn’t know how to praise God, because nobody ever gave me specifics. As we look now at one phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, “Hallowed be thy name,” we’ll …

What does it mean to pray, “Our Father”? It’s much more complicated than you think. Everything Jesus Christ came to do—the reason he came, the purpose of his salvation—was that we might receive adoption. We can pray “Our Father” because we’ve been adopted into the family of God. Let’s look briefly at 1) the gift of adoption, 2) what it means to be …

If you’re going to deal with the brutal realities of life, the writer of Hebrews says you have to have shepherds in your life. Hebrews is written to people whose lives are filled with problems. And here, in the last passage of Hebrews, the writer tells us if we’re gonna make it, we have to have shepherding in our lives. The text tells us 1) our ins…

When you embrace God by faith two things come into your life: a transforming power and a deep tension. It’s a duality. If you try to resolve the deep tension, you lose the transforming power. The writer of Hebrews says the great believers in history were resident aliens on earth. In Greco-Roman society, a resident alien was a permanent resident but…

This passage in Hebrews seems like an anti-climax. Throughout the book, the writer gives us something to help us face the brutal realities of life. But then, Hebrews 13 seems different. At first it looks like a to-do list, like miscellaneous ethical prescriptions, but that’s wrong. This is not an anti-climax. What we’re being told is that we’ll nev…

Hebrews was written to people who have been shaken by life. Difficulties and sufferings have shaken them to the core. The writer is trying to help them find ways to face the brutal realities of life, to stand solid when everything around them is falling apart. In Hebrews 12, we have the climax. The writer pulls together all of the threads and says,…

There’s never been a culture with a lower pain threshold than ours. There’s never been a culture that gave us fewer resources for dealing with the brutal realities of life and death than ours. The writer of Hebrews wants his readers to understand how to become the kind of people who can cope with the brutal realities of life. To a great degree, the…

Hebrews is written to help us have what it takes to face the difficulties of life. And in chapter 11, we’re told one of the keys is to be people of faith. But what is faith? In our cultural moment, conservatives see faith as a moral virtue, while liberals see skepticism as a mark of intellectual maturity. As usual, the Bible’s understanding of fait…

The book of Hebrews is written to people who are so beaten down with troubles that they’re ready to give up. The writer is trying to give the readers what they need to handle the brutal realities of life in this world. In Hebrews 11, he gives us something that helps us handle anything. If you have it, you can handle absolutely anything life throws …

When modern people hear that God requires blood to turn aside his wrath from sin, it sounds offensive. It sounds disgusting, primitive, obscene. Christianity has sometimes been called the religion of the slaughterhouse. It doesn’t seem to be what we need in a world that’s filled with blood and violence. But Jesus saves through his blood. And the bo…