1. What (if anything) makes a sermon distinctive?
  2. When God remembers his covenant with Noah and causes the flood to subside, he also chooses to forget.
  3. Maybe, just maybe, our goal for 2023 should not be to live more but to die more.
  4. The reason that God’s commandments are not burdensome is that Jesus has fulfilled them.
  5. Walking in the light doesn't entail a spotless moral record but rather an honest appraisal of who we are.
  6. With every bone in our bodies, we declare war on grace. We declare war on the gift.
  7. Because of Jesus, God always hears our prayers, and he always responds to them in love–regardless of the quality or quantity of the one speaking them.
  8. The world we inhabit is wrong in so many ways, and a holistic approach to this “wrongness” traces its cause both to sin itself and to the effects of sin.
  9. God’s candle is not so easily extinguished. His promise is not some vague light at the end of the tunnel that we may or may not reach. In fact, God’s light has a name: Jesus Christ.
  10. Without the sacraments, God’s grace is simply an artifact behind a glass-case in a museum. We might be able to describe and even admire it, but we never get firsthand access to it.
  11. God’s love is axiomatic; it just is. It’s a truism without a logical explanation.
  12. Only when we’re ready to accept the impossibility of human perfection can we move beyond the paralyzing myth that we are capable of anything good apart from Christ.