1. Everything in Scripture is God revealing himself to his people, you and me.
  2. It’s not our eloquence or persuasive rhetoric that changes hearts, but the Word of God that pierces through the hardened shells of unbelief and breathes life into the dead bones of sinners.
  3. God's faithfulness is constant and consistent. It knows no season. His love for us doesn't fade with the summer sun.
  4. If it’s all a fiction spun by disappointed disciples, if it’s a mere symbol for the idea of an inner awakening, if it’s not a fact that Christ has been raised, then our grief and loss have no end, and we have no hope.
  5. The needs of the people remain the same, but now the people are you and me. We still sin, and that sin causes so many challenges in our lives.
  6. Human history, our history, is the story of two Adams with two very different encounters with the devil.
  7. What we discover in O’Connor’s stories and Martin Luther’s theology is that God’s grace is elusive because the human heart is resistant to it.
  8. This is the message of Lent. We are not called to sacrifice for Jesus in order to earn our salvation. Rather, we are called to remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for us.
  9. As disciples of Jesus, our righteousness cannot be performed before others, because our righteousness was already performed by Jesus.
  10. Ash Wednesday's purpose is not to motivate our resolve to redouble our efforts to do better.
  11. I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.
  12. God is not calling us to “grow up.” He is calling us to dependence.