How I feel does not tell me who I am. Only God can tell me who I am, because he made me and takes care of me. He tells me that we are all born as male and female image bearers with souls that will last forever and gendered bodies that will either suffer eternally in hell or be glorified in the New Jerusalem.https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/love-your-neighbor-enough-to-speak-truth/
Calling God's sexual ethic hate speech does Satan's bidding. This is Orwellian nonsense or worse. I only know who I really am when the Bible becomes my lens for self-reflection, and when the blood of Christ so powerfully pumps my heart whole that I can deny myself, take up the cross, and follow him. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/love-your-neighbor-enough-to-speak-truth/
How do I judge my own sincerity? The saving grace of salvation is located in a holy and electing God, and a sacrificing, suffering, and obedient Savior. Stakes this high can never rest on my sincerity.
Christ redeems. Even our struggles, our failures, and our suffering are redemptive in Christ. But there is blood involved. There is a cutting off and a cutting away that redemption demands. Stepping into God's story means abandoning a deeply held desire to make meaning of our own lives on our own terms based on the preciousness of our own feelings. We leave and we cleave. Or we never really understand what it means that Christ died in our place.
God's story is our ontology: it explains our nature, our essence, our beginnings and our endings, our qualities, and our attributes. When we daily read our Bibles, in large chunks of whole books at a time, we daily learn that our own story began globally and ontologically. God has known us longer than anyone else has. The Bible declares that he knew us from before the foundations of the world.
The Bible reveals that sin is not a matter of knowing better. If it were, we would not need grace through the atoning Savior, Jesus Christ. Sin is deceptive. It takes people captive. Sin is more than a bad idea over which you have complete control.The Gospel comes with a house key, 123
Jesus dines with sinners not because sin is no big deal. Jesus dines with sinners not because he expects us to go on sinning. Jesus dines with sinners not because he knows that some of us are just more prone to certain sins than others, and he gives us a free pass when our inclinations lead us into sin. Jesus dines with sinners not because the Roman government made certain sins into a protected class of citizenship. The laws of the land do not nullify the laws of God. Jesus dines with sinners so that he can get close enough to touch us, so that he can participate in the intimacy of table fellowship as a healer and a helper. Jesus comes to change us, to transform us, so that after we have dined with Jesus, we want Jesus more than the sin that beckons our fidelity.The Gospel comes with a house key, 85
Practicing hospitality in our post-Christian world means that you develop thick skin. The hospitable meet people as strangers and invite them to become neighbors, and, by God's grace, many will go on to become part of the family of God. This transition from stranger to neighbor to family does not happen naturally but only with intent and grit and sacrifice and God's blessing.The Gospel comes with a house key, 62
Because of the blood of Christ, because Jesus dined with sinners but did not sin with sinners, because repentance is the threshold to God, table fellowship is both comforting and challenging. It meets you where you are and asks you to die so that you can live.The Gospel comes with a house key, 62
we, the well-known conservative Christians on the block, run a house that from the outside looks like a Christian commune. And we do not believe that this is excessive. We believe this is what the Bible calls normal. We believe that Christians are called to live as the family of God and to draw strangers and neighbors in, with food and bended knee, beseesching God's grace to pour out on those who do not yet know the Lord and to to encourage and uplift and fuel those who do.The Gospel comes with a house key
we believe that radically ordinary hospitality depends on the family of God knowing where to gather, knowing how to be organic and spontaneous with Scripture and open arms. And we do it because the purpose of radically ordinary hospitality is to take the hand of a stranger and put it in the hand of the Savior, to bridge hostile worlds, and to add to the family of God.The Gospel comes with a house key