Bucket Full of Grace

The theology of Paul explained: grace, justification by faith, union with Christ, and the gospel he suffered shipwreck, prison, and execution to proclaim — and why it still changes everything today. He had every reason to be confident in his own righteousness. Paul — born Saul of Tarsus, a Roman citizen, a Hebrew of Hebrews, trained at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the most respected rabbis of the first century, a Pharisee of the strictest order — was by his own account blameless under the law (Philippians 3:6). He knew the Torah. He kept it. He was so zealous for Israel's God that he hunted down followers of Jesus and had them killed. And then, on the road to Damascus, he met Jesus. And everything he thought he knew about righteousness, about God, about how a human being stands before their Creator — it all collapsed and was rebuilt from the ground up around a single, staggering reality: grace. The theology Paul spent the rest of his life articulating — in letters to churches in Ro...

1 Samuel explained: explore the dramatic transition from judges to kings in Israel — through Samuel, Saul, and David — and discover what God's choices reveal about the kind of heart He is always seeking. There is a line in 1 Samuel that has quietly shaped how millions of people understand God's relationship to human leadership, ambition, and the heart. It is spoken by God to the prophet Samuel as he surveys the impressive sons of Jesse, looking for the next king of Israel. He sees Eliab — tall, impressive, the obvious choice — and assumes this must be the one. God stops him cold: "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart." — 1 Samuel 16:7 That sentence is the interpretive key to the whole book. First Samuel is not primarily a story about politics or military history, though it has plenty of both. It is a story about...