The apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Thessalonica pulsates with a sense of urgency. He regularly uses words like: exhort, encourage, urge, and admonish. For example:

We ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you receiv...

As long as you are looking to yourself for salvation, there is absolutely no hope for you. Salvation does not come from within you. It cannot. The life you need is found in Christ and your hope lies in Him.

If you are drawn to Jesus today,...

The first thing we learn about God in the Bible is that when He speaks, things are created that did not exist before. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light (Gen. 1:3).

Now here is God the Son, God in the flesh, and when He co...

Grace is more than God making salvation possible. It’s more than God opening a door and then standing back to see who will come through. By nature nobody would come through. An open door is no different from a closed door to a dead man.

Gr...

Many church people have bought into a view of sin that goes like this: We all mess up in various ways, and nobody is perfect. But God is gracious and kind. If we are sorry and want to do better, God will forgive us and help us, and it was Jesus wh...

We must take the Bible seriously here. It doesn’t say, “You were trapped in your sins.” It says, “You were dead in your sins”! If a man falls into a pit, you can throw him a rope. But if he is dead in the pit, the rope is of no use to him.

There are so many barriers, so many reasons that can keep us from God. There are so many reasons to put off the decision. It is only by God’s grace that any of us come to Him.

If you have never come, then begin a journey of faith and repen...

No generation has been so often told that God loves us, and no generation has struggled more to experience God’s love.

One reason for this is that our ideas about God’s love have become sentimental. We have failed to take God’s wrath serio...

Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). On the cross, He became the sin bearer: “He himself bore our sins in the body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24).

“He… bore our sins” means that Jesus came under all the co...

This does not mean that if we do some bad things, the wrath of God will come on us. We are children of wrath by nature. That means, by nature, we are absorbed with self and drawn to sin. By nature, we want to be our own gods. By nature, we were un...

One of the greatest problems with evolutionary theory is that if it were true, the world should be a better place by now.

If we are getting better, surely by now, war should have ended, children should be safe, and women should be treated ...

This verse is disturbing, but its meaning is clear—the default position of every human life is that we are under the wrath of God. To help us grasp the importance of this, here is a parable...

Imagine a beautiful church with stained-glass ...

In the 1990s, filmmaker Woody Allen left the woman he had been in a long-term relationship with to be with her adopted daughter. When asked why he would do such a thing, he responded by saying, “The heart wants what it wants.”

That is exac...

If the fires have burned low in your marriage, expect your sinful nature to produce thoughts about divorce. Something within you will say, “You deserve better than this. There’s another person out there for you.” If you are discouraged in...

The Keto diet is the one where you can eat high fat foods but no carbs. This appeals to some people—a diet in which you can eat steak and bacon. But it doesn’t usually last long, because after a few days your body starts craving bread.

Wha...

The first two words of Ephesians 2:3 are crucial to our understanding of the pervasiveness of sin in all human beings, “We all…”

Notice how Paul moves from you in verse 1 to us in verse 3: “You were dead in the trespasses...

Notice that sin is in the thoughts, it’s in the desires, and it’s in the cravings of the human heart. Sin pervades the mind, the will, and the heart. Our thoughts, desires, and affections are all corrupted by sin.

Sin corrupts the whole hum...

God cuts back the weed of sin, but the day is coming when He will pull sin up altogether and cast it into the fire. Sin will be no more. And there will be a new heaven and earth, the home of righteousness.

Suffering came into the world on t...

This is God’s assessment of humanity, and He built restraints into human life to cut back evil and corruption. Here are four of them…

God restrains sin through law
If there were no laws, our streets would not be safe. Th...

This is the first mention of prayer in the Bible. What was happening that caused people to pray for the first time?

When the destructive effects of sin became obvious in the world—broken families, violence, and murder—people began to pray. ...

Sin is like a wild animal, a predator, crouching at the door. God said to Cain, “Its desire is for you.” Sin is a destructive power. It is an active enemy.

Suppose you paint a wall in your house, and a child draws all over it with a crayon....

Imagine a young man named “Jack” who begins attending a new church. He comes in one day to talk to his new pastor. After some small talk, the conversation goes something like this…

Pastor: “Tell me, Junior, how did you become a Christian?”...

Adam came out of the hand of God upright, but Seth came out of the womb. He was born in the likeness of his father, a sinner. Poor Seth—sin was in his father and mother by their own choice. Sin was in him by nature and by birth.

Not only w...

Do you see the difference between Adam and Seth? Adam was created in the image of God, and his son still bears that image, but Adam’s son also bears the image of his father, who is a sinner.

God made Adam upright, but Adam became a sinner a...

In all the generations that came from Adam, not one person has been born who was truly upright, until God became man in Jesus Christ. The upright one did not arise from the human race. He came to the human race. The Holy Son of G...

Try to imagine Jesus saying these words to you. Whatever words He said to you next would make you aware of at least one undeniable, verifiable sin in your life.

And when you can see one sin in your life (and you’re really convinced that it...

Every time you see the wretched destructive power of evil breaking out in the world, use this verse to cultivate a greater hatred toward sin in your life. Say to yourself, “The root of this thing lies in me!” Use this as an incentive to holiness.<...

God did not burden Adam with sin. God made him upright. Adam was the one who used his freedom to forfeit his righteousness.

If you are shaking your fist at God today perhaps it is because, somewhere deep inside, you feel that the ...

Doing good and right was instinctive to Adam, but it was not inevitable. Adam’s righteousness was natural, but it was also changeable.

So, why did God allow the possibility of sin? If Adam and Eve had remained upright, the whole human race ...