2 samuel on Grace

Jesus, we receive your blessings and pray for the Holy Spirit to make them real in our lives. Renew a right spirit within us, a poor spirit, a spirit that knows our deep need of your grace and deliver...

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchan...

A Psalm of Trust Psalm 4, the lectionary psalm for this third Sunday of Easter, follows a psalm of lament (Psalm 3) in which David bemoans his political enemies, who included his own rebellious son A...

Preaching Commentary Paul’s Prize Fight Paul pulls no punches in this letter to the church of Ephesus. It is an onslaught of theological intensity from the first ring of the bell. Like a prize figh...

Preaching Commentary A Psalm of Trust Psalm 4, the lectionary psalm for this third Sunday of Easter, follows a psalm of lament (Psalm 3) in which David bemoans his political enemies, who included h...

When a musical instrument’s strings go loose, it sounds awful. But you can also overtighten the strings, breaking them or creating discord. There’s a perfect tension to grace and truth, which makes th...

Karl Barth was right when he termed God’s grace his great “nevertheless.”

When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn't go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.

Through Jesus’s family tree, God puts his grace on display. God is reminding us that he can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: pick up broken pieces and put them together, take broken lives an...

Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning.

If we minimize grace, the world sees no hope for salvation. If we minimize truth, the world sees no need for salvation.

Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit. . . . Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to withdraw it in the presence of human demerit. . . . [Gra...

If we minimize grace, the world sees no hope for salvation. If we minimize truth, the world sees no need for salvation.

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.