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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History is the painful realization that we aren’t the ones who can save the world but, rather, we’re the ones who get saved.
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
We can see this as a foreshadowing of how the LORD always comes to His people—the people do not come to Him. So, it is God who sent His Son to us, His Promised One, up close and personal.
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.
[Because] of the relationship of presence the LORD has with His people, His holiness ‘gets on them,’ and, as a result, this is what their life now looks like because the holy LORD is their God.
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?
At first, one might think bones would strictly be associated with death, but in the Old Testament the most significant references to “bones” are associated with life and even resurrection from death.
Despite the very real obstacles and difficulties, this entire scene is marked by God’s gracious work.