1. We don't make Church "happen." Only Christ can do so. It's his happening.
  2. The hardest thing you and I will ever be called to do is to believe that it is done already, that it really and truly is finished.
  3. If you interpret James, as most do, as an encouragement toward proving your faith by your works and then say it is your "favorite" then you are proclaiming that your favorite thing about the Christian faith is the practical outworking, the proving your faith by your works.
  4. Even if the numbers are bad, the news about Jesus crucified for sinners and raised to new life hasn’t become any less good.
  5. There is a revival, no less real and even more definitive, taking place in every church, every weekend, where God’s people gather around his gifts.
  6. A Christian is a man who desires to enter heaven not through his own goodness and works, but through the righteousness and works of Christ.
  7. To believe God is love and thus loves you is a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit.
  8. We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
  9. 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.
  10. The law had to have its way with the expert to bring him around (and back) to Abraham's response.
  11. The nefarious thing about idolatry is that just about anything can become your idol: career, family, fame, wealth, status, spouse, you name it, any good thing can become a ‘god-thing” with ease. 
  12. Maybe, just maybe, our goal for 2023 should not be to live more but to die more.