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"And when we gather at City Pres we sing about this gathering in the future that will be different. We don’t look like it yet, but we still sing of it in confession and hope. In our ‘not-yet gatherings’ we confess our failures. We are a broken communion of called out ones in a broken world. But we also confess our hope. Our hope that this will be different. In the ‘not yet’ of 2019 and in confidence in the ‘now’ of the new heavens and new earth."

"I am so caught up in my busy life, and my busy heart, that it can be all that I see, and I treat it as my kingdom and desperately try to hold it up. It makes me laugh cynically when thinking of all of this, because we are all laboring in vain and working so hard to do it, all the while being completely oblivious to it. I am deeply thankful for the good news that God calls us out of ourselves and our false worship of our own worlds, and calls us into worship with Him."

"You become what you are regarded as. Here in Romans 4, Paul says, that God reckons us as righteous. Here the end time Word of God’s blessing invades our world in the now and declares that we are righteous. His end-time Word into the now

"There is no emphasis on my action, my behavior, my commitment level, or my productivity...the emphasis is on how out of my own control my own identity is… which feels uncomfortable… and liberating. I have favor from God. That’s the final word. My identity, the “what” of who I am, is already set in stone."

"I can’t fix this. My ‘Ugh’ is my groan

"Each of us is made by God to delight and rest in him differently. And yet by taking one day a week for rest, the very rhythm of our lives declares that we are God’s people, formed in his Image and secure in the work he has finished on our behalf."