In Christ, you are bound. Bound to mercy. Bound to grace. Bound to a God who won’t let you go. And because of that, you are free—gloriously, joyfully free.
The baptized do not celebrate sin—they grieve it.
When Jesus ascends, he does so, bearing gifts for you.

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To be textual in our preaching, we ought to do as Paul does, and drag our people through the Old Testament narratives. We ought to let the Holy Spirit do the illustrations. Of course, Paul’s illustrating too, but he’s doing it in the Spirit and using the Holy Spirit’s own vocabulary.
We’re tempted to try and connect the dots. Something bad happens to someone and we can’t help but wonder about the cause. Even if we don’t say it out loud, we are tempted to think they must have done something to deserve it. They must be guilty of something. God must be punishing them for something we don’t know about. But Jesus stops this thinking in its tracks.
Pastors are built from the same stuff as everyone else. That’s good, and that’s bad.
Our enoughness before God cannot be earned by our piety or bestowed by our neighbor. Our righteousness and our justification come from Christ and His work for us
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works for me, not because it substitutes a temporal and flimsy antidote to my problems but because it points me to the God who has adopted and baptized me
The great steadfast love of God is shown by His work on the cross
Everything in the text sets up the polarity of earth and heaven, mortification and glorification, humiliation and exaltation. We preach the cross, because it is the only way to glory. Just look at Jesus, who set His face toward Jerusalem, endured the cross, despising its shame, and is now seated at the right hand of power, with all things under His feet.
I don’t think the people of Jerusalem designed to reject God. They didn’t wake up one day and decide that, instead of listening to God, they would make it their mission to kill him. They were deceived. Blinded. Deluded by sin and its author. As a result, they were unable and unwilling to hear the Word of the Lord.
“There is no obedience that does not have its eyes on either God or neighbor. An obedience that is motivated by what we will get out of it is no obedience at all.”
Netflix just recently released a series called The Umbrella Academy, another comic book series adapted for screen.
“Each of us shares in this sin; the sin of self-justification and disbelief in God’s promises.”
Our sin marked Christ. Jesus was marked with the scars of nails and a spear for us. His hands, feet, and side are marked with scars displaying the cost of our redemption.