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Today, do not merely manage your mind. Drive your mind continually back to the One who made it and whose beauty alone can truly satisfy it. To love God with all your mind and strength, is to let your mind and heart be captivated by him.

Unlike false idols that rely on human devotion and service, our God is the self-sufficient Father and the giver of all—sharing life itself so that we may know, walk with, and love him.

This new husband, Jesus, is not a demanding master standing over you with a checklist. He is a life-giving husband who took your ugliness, sin, and shame down into death to bury it forever, sharing with you his own life and perfect righteousness, making you beautiful in his sight and calling you his very own.

When we read the word of God, we find it reads us. It pierces deep. It finds us, it discovers our innermost filth. It judges, and it saves, just as it judged Eglon and it saved the people.

The mutual knowing of Father, Son and Spirit is, to put it simply, the deepest truth of all. It is the foundational and all-encompassing intimacy. It is the affection of which all life is simply a joyful overflow.

The Christian life is defined by Jesus, centred on Jesus, and it even begins to look like Jesus, in all his loveliness and goodness. It is not your own life, but his life being worked out in you. It is this way from day one, and will be this way right to the day when your race has been won. And it will never stop feeling like kneeling at the cross in worship and wonder.

I receive the abundant-life-giving coming of Jesus as I know and am known in my local church. Local church matters because knowing and being known matter.

There is no distance Christ is unwilling to go. There is no job beneath him that he will not joyfully complete in love. And now he is risen in glory, with holes in his hands and standing as a Lamb who was slain (Rev. 5:6). This is what greatness looks like. This is what glory looks like. This is what true leadership looks like.

It is here, and only here where we find our everlasting comfort. Our everlasting beauty. Our everlasting life. 

As we watch, and as we wait in the wilderness of our world today, may we too lift our voices to cry, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” For he who was faithful to come, will come again, just as he promised. And so we cry, “Come, Lord Jesus.”