1. The issue is not the existence of so-called inner rings, but our desire and willingness to spend our lives in order to gain from an inner ring what is freely promised in Christ: hope, security, and identity.
  2. The only place to begin a discussion of human/creaturely identity is with our relationship to the God whose breath filled dust, brought us to life, sustains us and gives us a hopeful future.
  3. We may not all be mass-murdering Nazis. But we all have the same root sin that causes the most egregious criminal activity on the face of the earth. We all have the desire to be our own God.
  4. The Parable of the Lost Sheep bursts through the confines of convention and demands that we embrace the messiness of life and the unpredictable ways in which God's grace and forgiveness operates.
  5. Tim wanted everyone to know to the deepest part of their being that they were justified by Christ alone.
  6. The Lord knew how it felt to be a rejected stone.
  7. The drama of Scripture is about God renaming us by bringing us into his image-bearing family once again. And it would take “a name above all names” to accomplish it.
  8. This is the prelude of Easter. Is a dead Jesus still resting in the tomb? No!
  9. Rightly distinguishing between law and gospel, as Paul helps us see in 2 Corinthians 3, is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
  10. The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.
  11. Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.
  12. The law had to have its way with the expert to bring him around (and back) to Abraham's response.