Wisdom and strength require bootstrap-pulling and the placing of noses to grindstones.
“If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith?

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Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.
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.
What pressures or dangers are these particular people, in this particular place, facing right now which keep them from being “rooted and built up” in Christ? What is keeping them from “abounding in thanksgiving”?
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
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.
What might be a unique challenge of this text is how our preaching of it might itself resonate with its mystery. It goes to a broader question: How can we retain a sense of the “mysterious” in our preaching of mysterious texts?
Moses is no Jesus but he, like us, is saved by Him. The law cannot enter the promised land, and yet the true and greater promised land is occupied by nothing but lawbreakers.
With every bone in our bodies, we declare war on grace. We declare war on the gift.
Paul is giving thanks for the reality that the gospel grows just as much in the little places as it does in the centers of power.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is both a call to faith in Jesus and a call to love our neighbor.
How do we preach a text of exhortation while keeping the sermon Gospel-centered?
Despite the very real obstacles and difficulties, this entire scene is marked by God’s gracious work.