Welcome to the Paul Tripp podcast, where pastor and best-selling author Dr. Paul David Tripp connects the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life.

Get your act together and live in a manner worthy of the gospel.

This is, sadly, a common style of preaching within the church.

But in today's episode, we'll listen to an old sermon from Paul where he explains that we

have no ability to live up to that high calling on our own.

Rather, Christ's grace measures up on our behalf and allows us to live out of the gospel.

Here's Paul with the worthy community. In my 20 years at the Christian counseling and educational foundation, they somehow found

their way to my office. Old men and young men, old women and young women, the married and the unmarried, wealthy and not so wealthy,

teenagers and young professionals, but all of them with the same sad story of some kind of devastation

in relationship. I've sat with wives who could not believe the betrayal of their husbands.

I sat with people who bore in front of me the burdens of the beating of that week.

I listened to teenagers who felt lost and alienated and unloved.

Of unmarried people who wondered if there was something wrong with them.

Of people in midlife who would tell the stories of

the abuses of their youth and weep as if it happened yesterday. I wept with them.

And there were times when I would cry in my heart, Lord, how long, how long, how long.

And if I would sit and listen to these stories, I would think of how far this moment

seems from the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, from the beauty of the restoration of his

love and the forming of a community of love.

How distant it all seemed from the glory of what we are given in Christ.

And I felt a deep sense of responsibility and privilege, not to tell people that it would be okay,

because in there were moments where it would not be okay, but to point them to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are ways in which those weeks

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