1. His love for you is so deep that in his mercy, while you were yet a sinner, God sent his only begotten Son to die for you.
  2. “So loved,” then isn’t about how much but instead simply how.
  3. Love is pointing to Jesus who said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
  4. Rightly distinguishing between law and gospel, as Paul helps us see in 2 Corinthians 3, is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
  5. 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.
  6. All of Scripture, every last syllable of it, is meant to drive us to "consider Jesus," the One who comes to "make us right" by gifting us his righteousness.
  7. Jesus not only healed her daughter, but he also gave himself to her. Wherever she went from then on, he was with her.
  8. We assert, we herald, the truth about God becoming King of the world in and through Jesus of Nazareth alone. It is our public announcement.
  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. As the writer to the Hebrews affirms, what makes the Christian gospel so much better is that we are no longer dealing with “types and shadows."
  12. Maybe, just maybe, our goal for 2023 should not be to live more but to die more.