1. When properly distinguishing law and gospel in the Word of God, it is important to use the God-given gift and abilities of the imagination as your ears.
  2. The Holy Spirit unleashes his power through us, his vines, and we then get to watch as his fruits blossom and ripen.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. This is an excerpt from chapter 9 of “What Can Really Know?: The Strengths and Limits of Human Understanding” by David Andersen (1517 Publishing, 2023).
  6. No matter how far away they wander, God always hears the prayers of his children.
  7. Prayer is not just about asking for things. It's about receiving what has already been given to us in Christ.
  8. What I desperately needed was not to preach to myself, but to listen to a preacher—not to take myself in hand, but to be taken in the hands of the Almighty.
  9. Just like for Mordecai and Esther, our lives are also sustained by the hand of God in the ordinary, in events begging to be seen as the work of Christ in our lives.
  10. When we forget that we live by promise, that's when the danger tends to creep in. Because failing to embrace promise means we usually fall back into notions of luck, or even worse--into works.
  11. Tim wanted everyone to know to the deepest part of their being that they were justified by Christ alone.
  12. God wants his word of promise to be the only thing we bank on, the only thing we have confidence in.