Whatever thing I thought would make life good… It will never be enough. It was, of course, never supposed to be enough. Only the gift of God through Christ in the Spirit “fills” us.

When the Gospel-WHY changes our HOW, this will transform WHAT we do.

HOW do I get up in the morning? HOW do I do my work? HOW do I treat these people? HOW do I make plans, manage money, spend my down-time? WHY changes HOW, and everything is changed.

The HOWs of our lives are determined by the WHYs of our heart.

When WHY changes, everything changes. Motives and desires are in everything we do. The Gospel changes our WHY and WHY changes everything.

Tuesday some of the folks on the Building Committee toured several area church buildings. We asked our guides various questions. But our main concern was this: What designed features have you found most helpful for ministry, and what features have you grown frustrated by?

These were the most common replies.

When you don’t know how to pray, when your mind is just too chaotic, the Lord, your shepherd, is with you, watching over you, praying to God the Father for you. We are always being prayed for by Jesus. We are always on His mind, in His heart. “He will hold me fast.”

So often we go about our lives without regard for what may be entering our lives, or what we may be introducing into the lives of others. We are reactive and passive. Weed seeds blow in or their roots tunnel toward us, and suddenly we're wrapped up in what is just The Most nonsense, anxiety, or foolishness.

Psalm 101 is mostly affirmations, self-talk taken right off the best of the web’s “best practices for great mornings” articles.

What has Paul been doing in Galatia? He’s been engaged in the spiritually exhausting, emotionally demanding, mentally taxing work of introducing sinners to Jesus and trying his best to make sure they understand who Jesus is and what He did and what that now means for them. It’s labor, he says, toil, struggle; it’s hard work.

I’ve been reflecting on the Bible’s historicity. That is the question of whether the story of the Bible is meant to be read as existing within the same universe, the same timeline, on the same planet, having the same sorts of people, as our lives. The answer, of course, is yes: The Bible is clearly, thickly, meant to be read as historical. All measures of historicity verify this.