There is a righteous way and an unrighteous way, a good path and a foolish path. After all, the Bible is realistic. Even many great heroes in the Bible were compromised.

Revelation 14:7 does not give us the content of the gospel, but addresses the motive to respond to the gospel, since the end is so close. People are called to respond in worship to their Creator, because judgment time is here.

It will take God’s immeasurable power to bring about the ultimate transformation on the last day. But already His formidable power—the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, is at work in us by His Holy Spirit to transform us, to begin the work of changing our hearts and minds.

The righteousness of God which transcends the ages, has now been disclosed. It is not in the framework of the old Law covenant with its sacrificial system and its structures. These things pointed forward to what is now being introduced by Christ. If the righteousness of God is now made known “apart from the law,” that very law bore

witness to this new state of affairs and anticipated this day.

We can trust a God who not only is sovereign, but bleeds for us. When there are no other answers for our guilt, our fears, our uncertainties or our anguish, there is One immovable place on which to stand.. It is the ground right in front of the cross. It is appropriate to speak of the God who dies, who died for us.

The new birth is grounded in Jesus’ death. That is what Jesus is saying. You and I receive the benefit of this not by trying harder or by being ultra-religious, but by believing in Jesus.

God is transcendent in His omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence; but God is also personal: a moral agent who knows, intends, feels and acts. In this sense we are like God with respect to personality, but in a finite way.

The burden of the New Testament is that Jesus dies a substitutionary death. He does not deserve to die. When God sent Him to do His Father’s will, to go to the cross and die, it was with a purpose: to die our death so that we do not have to die, so that we may have eternal life. But we must trust Him and discover that His life becomes ours as our death becomes His. His life becomes ours! Much of the New Testament is given to unpacking precisely that point.

We have been privileged beyond measure to be saved by God’s love, shown and informed about His love, and to know the mind of God. It is our responsibility to seek to understand God’s love and to pass it on to others who need to understand it, so that in understanding it, they can also receive His love.

It is wonderful for believers to try to magnify God’s name, but not ever because they succumb to the illusion that they are doing God a favor. Worshiping God, magnifying His name, ought to be the response of gratitude and adoration and nothing else