He, the Creator of everything that is, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Alpha and the Omega, the Seed who crushed the serpent’s head, the Beginning and the End, became weak, disabled, and disposed of.

Whether we are aware of it or not, each of us lives with a deep craving for positive, life-giving verdicts to overrule the negative verdicts pronounced over us from the outside and from within.

Whether from a stage or behind a pulpit or through a screen, we look a lot more together than what we feel in our hearts.

When the love of Jesus captivates us, our hearts will naturally, and quite effortlessly, love him first and to love him most.

We simply cannot manufacture character in ourselves, no matter how hard we try. Love is not a to-do-list.

Any kind of work that leaves people, places, or things in better shape than before…is work that should be celebrated as good.

Because God has declared us to be blameless in his sight through the finished work of Jesus, we truly have nothing left to prove.

What if we really believed that being loved was our starting point with God, before we do anything good or bad?

If Jesus, who will one day resolve every groan in his good creation, was subject to the groan, shouldn’t we expect to be also?

If only we knew now what we will one day know about our own work and how it fits into God’s overall plan to save and heal the world.