In our early days of following Jesus, our faith is more “free-range”; we are excited, motivated, and eager to live to Jesus. Along the way, our faith can become domesticated, not by the gospel but by religious expectation. Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good, he came to make bound people free.

When a Christian reflects on their life, very often, they will find it has been lived in light of three ghosts: (1) the ghosts behind, (2) the ghosts ahead, and (3) the ghost within. Pastor Allen applies this paradigm to the experiences of his own life and brokenness. Through his story, we can see how Jesus can save anye haunted and condemned person because He has been conferred the authority to do so.

On this side of heaven, we all will struggle with persistent sins - it is a reality of loving in a fallen world. The question for us is not whether or not, but HOW, we fight these sins. Will we enter into the help God provides, or strive on our own, overlooking and skirting around sin? Will we allow Jesus to be our grace and strength? Or will we spend our lives saying to ourselves, each time our sin remains the same, “...here we go again...?"

In examining one of the most heartbreaking portions of Scripture, we are faced with difficult but important questions about pain and isolation. How do we get to places where we concede in the most unthinkable ways, and how does Christ provide a way out and forward for us?

Living faith, which distinguishes itself from saving faith, is inexorably linked to the promises of God. And while somedays those promises are hard to believe, they don’t have to be hard to follow. Living faith is outworked day by day, step by step.

While some look to Scripture for positive examples of human behavior, most commonly Scripture shows us the frailty of human will and how God’s grace and mercy works in and through even the worst of circumstances and sin. We are prone to take shortcuts in the journey that God has us on; shortcuts can lead to sin, and sin can lead to sorrow, but ultimately even in the worst of sorrows we are seen by a loving and gracious God, who sent his Son to win us back to him in the end.