fabric softener for the heart

Along Spruce St, I see homeless people with roses.

not selling them, just carrying them around. that means a) someone randomly decided to give them a rose, or b) they are planning to give a rose to someone.

either case makes my heart sing.

Why preach the gospel?

So conversations don’t end up like the following:

A: How are you doing spiritually?
B: *pause* Not well.
A: Wsup?
B: Not really doing QTs and praying to God. Been busy.
A: Ok. I’ll pray for you.
B: Yea cool thanks. Wanna see my new iPhone app?

(DA Carson:) D-D-Do you see? The sheer banality of seeing your relationship with God based on performance (and if your Google calendar allows) instead of His grace.

How do I perform well enough to say I’m doing OK spiritually? What’s my pathetic metric? It’s the equivalent of asking “when is God faithful” because it surely isn’t everlasting!

“I’m not doing well spiritually” is like saying “I am less worthy of blessing in these bad times so I’m just waiting for God to deal me punishment…eventually. For now, I’ll fake guiltiness to church people, pay lip service promises, and God will have sympathy.”

Perverted! This “I’ll try harder” mindset. Success in the Christian life is not up to you! Christ’s infinite merit is the substance of the relationship between you and God. and that is very
very
very
freeing.
Now go and make commitments without burdens hanging over your head if you are indeed free.

And that is the gospel.

Jerry Bridges posed most of these challenges and I’m just letting you guys know.

grace through His life

Tullian Tchividjian recently made an interesting remark gently reminding followers of Kevin DeYoung that being "Christ-centered" does not mean that the death of Christ is more important than the life of Christ. Without the law fulfilled in His life, what righteousness is there to impute?

I think that's a rebuke for me as well, since I easily and readily cast down Christ-imitators that I judge to have no foundation. In thinking only Christ's death matters, I see how this practically plays out in my life...a lot of self-righteousness & lazy fruit. At the same time, without the cross we're in no position to imitate Christ (1 Corinthians 15:19). I need a balance. I need to live out the entire Gospel, not driven by half of it.

Christ himself is the center of all things!

Tumblr page, net difference = 0

http://williszhang.tumblr.com/

Tumblr has its charm in using a "feed" interface like Twitter and Facebook. And that's probably the only difference.

I figured out how to import my Blogger posts to Tumblr: download the two PHP scripts from this site and use ZZEE PHP GUI to run the first file. Fill out the forms and then the entries are miraculously imported.