The gospel is news about what God has done and is doing. In the Bible it’s first and foremost what God has done in Christ, supremely focused on Christ—His resurrection & all that springs from that. It’s what God has done and is doing.

If a church fails in a significant way to discipline and lovingly correct its members with respect to gross sustained sins, is that institution still a church?

The Spirit of God will apprehend us and we must get alone with God and fight the battle out before Him. Until this is done, we lose every time in the most important battle of life, our will, regardless of external world circumstances

We can believe in the virgin birth of an atheistic universe that is indifferent to us, a universe where there is no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but indifference. The other option is, we can believe in the virgin birth of a God who loves us so deeply that he came to be born among us to satisfy the need that would allow fallen sinners such as ourselves, to be once again reunited in the right relation with a Holy God who is willing to call us His own.

We should be working constantly to identify the parts of our lives that are not of Christ so that we eradicate them and fill him in the void.

Our culture has declared war on guilt. Dr. Wayne Dyer was one of the first influential voices to decry guilt altogether. He named guilt as nothing but a neurosis. “Guilt zones,” he wrote, “must be exterminated, spray-cleaned and sterilized forever.” Society encourages sin, but it will not tolerate the guilt sin produces.

Isaiah was not to act like the Judeans who failed to make God the most central fact of their existence. He was to pass this message on to the people. “The Lord is the one you people are to regard as holy. He is the one you are to fear.”

Education can have great, obvious merit. But elevating it to the highest place leads us to look for the wrong thing to bring us peace and fulfillment. The dilemma of all mankind is we can never satisfy ourselves—we always want something else.

James suggests that passions aroused in us by our sin nature and the world influencing us are leading to disruptions in the church and personal relationships. Any conflict on any level is always connected to one party pushing to have personal desire fulfilled, whether it is right or wrong.

James gives six practical perspectives enabling believers to patiently endure trials: anticipate the Lord’s coming, recognize the Lord’s judgment, follow the Lord’s servants, understand the Lord’s blessing, realize the Lord’s purpose, and always consider the Lord’s character.