For the Joy before Him, Christ Came
When you come to Christ for mercy and love and help in your anguish and perplexity and sinfulness, you are going with the flow of his own deepest wishes, not against them.
Articles by Dane Ortlund
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God gave his own Son as the final sacrifice so that your brokenness could be the only prerequisite to receiving God’s abundant mercy.
Jonathan Edwards gives us longings for God and for holiness that are more satisfying than even our best joys currently are.
Why You Must Leverage Your Self-Despair
There is a strange though consistent message throughout the Bible. We are told time and again that the way forward will feel like we’re going backward.
What Does Perfect Anger Look Like?
Christ got angry and still gets angry, for he is the perfect human, who loves too much to remain indifferent. And this righteous anger reflects his heart, his tender compassion.
What Is Distinct about the Theology of 2 Corinthians?
If otherwise vital Pauline notions such as “grace” and “law” are nowhere near the heart of Paul’s concerns in 2 Corinthians, what is the heart or center or core burden of this letter?
People are rebellious, even God’s people, but God himself insists on doing his people eternal good anyway.
Rather than dispensing grace to us from on high, Jesus gets down with us, he puts his arm around us, he deals with us in the way that is just what we need.
When Jesus, the Clean One, touched an unclean sinner, Christ did not become unclean. The sinner became clean.
It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger.”
It is in “our weaknesses” that Jesus sympathizes with us. His is a love that cannot be held back when he sees his people in pain.
If God sent his own Son to walk through the valley of condemnation, rejection, and hell, you can trust him as you walk through your own valleys on your way to heaven.
Why Devotional Bible Reading Is Good Bible Reading
The purpose of reading the Bible devotionally is to commune with God and grow closer to him.
Why the Book of Psalms Is for You
The Psalms were written for ordinary Christians leading ordinary lives—lives marked by depression, discouragement, despair, frustration, or maybe even numbness toward God or anger toward others.
The Most Accessible Person in the Universe
Jesus is lowly, he's accessible. You don't have to go through security to get to him. You just have to humble yourself.
Understanding the Role of Justification
Theologically understood, justification is the moment—the event—that God declares a sinner righteous in his sight.
For all his resplendent glory and dazzling holiness, his supreme uniqueness and otherness, no one in human history has ever been more approachable than Jesus Christ.
We need to look to Christ. We need to draw our strength from him. The way we grow is simply by looking to Christ.
The doctrine of the atonement reassures us with what Christ has done in the past, the doctrine of his intercession reassures us with what he is doing in the present.
The atoning work of the Son, decreed by the Father and applied by the Spirit, ensures that we are safe eternally.
Do not minimize your sin or excuse it away. Raise no defense. Simply take it to the one who is already at the right hand of the Father, advocating for you on the basis of his own wounds.
What Bible Reading and Eating Have in Common
Devotional Bible reading is vital for every believer in the same way that eating is vital for every human—it's just the way you're nourished. It's what you do to get stronger and grow.
Christ’s Heart on Full Display
Jesus proves that he is gentle and lowly through his actions throughout his life and the pages of the Gospels.
Scripture: The Treasure of the Christian Life
When we immerse ourselves in Edwards's writings, we do not find him speaking of Scripture so much as speaking from it.
All our human friendships have a limit to what they can withstand. But what if there were a friend with no limit?
Are we swimming in the mental and emotional universe of what God has told us our future is?
How Christ Has Changed Our Destiny
What does it mean to be united to Christ? It’s a little bit mysterious and elusive.
What the Puritans Understood about the Human Heart
The genius of the Puritans was that they knew how to build bridges between Scripture and the human heart.
Just as we can hardly fathom the divine ferocity awaiting those out of Christ, it is equally true that we can hardly fathom the divine tenderness already resting now on those in Christ.
The whole reason we care about sound doctrine is for the sake of preserving God’s beauty,