“The fear of the Lord” is our heart’s awakening to and recognition of God’s outrageous goodness.
The women at the tomb were surprised by Easter. Amazed and filled with wonder at Jesus' Easter eucatastrophe. And so are we.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.

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The reason nothing can come before Jesus is because nothing endures beyond the grave except for Jesus.
Don't lose hope. Don't avoid church on Sunday morning.
In the text, Jesus enters a Pharisee’s house for dinner. Between the invitation and the meal, however, Jesus transforms this man’s home into a place of God’s care.
When offering encouragement to His disciples to follow Him, Jesus did not promise a pain-free life in this world. Instead, He highlighted the struggle and the difficulty. Why?
We bring nothing with us that contributes to the preaching or the hearing of God’s promise to us.
This is true discipleship. We live with Jesus, we hold on to Jesus, we suffer with Jesus, because Jesus brings a divisive peace that saves.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
We are loved by our heavenly Father. When the Creator and Giver of all good things is caring for you, suddenly, you are free to care for others.
What Jesus promises is better than justice. Jesus promises grace.
This is not just a pericope about hereditary sin and actual sins, nor is it providing a pattern for prayer. It is fundamentally about God our gracious Father and His promise to hear us, answer us, and provide for us.
But it is not always helpful to create tidy categories of good and bad and to say, “Stop being ‘a Martha’ and do a better job of being ‘a Mary.’” That is a dangerous sermon to preach. In doing so, we can fall into the very thing we see Martha doing.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is both a call to faith in Jesus and a call to love our neighbor.