1. To believe God is love and thus loves you is a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit.
  2. Jesus stands before the disciples as the bridge between heaven and earth, and between Old Testament and New Testament.
  3. 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.
  4. “So loved,” then isn’t about how much but instead simply how.
  5. 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).
  6. Forty days after giving birth, Mary, along with her husband Joseph, presented their firstborn Son at the temple and "bought" him back with a sacrifice of two small birds. This is known as the "Presentation of Our Lord."
  7. The further up and further into the season of Epiphany we get, the bigger the grace of God in Christ is, the brighter the Light of Christ shines, and the more blessed we are in Jesus' epiphany for us.
  8. Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.
  9. The usual acclamation when one becomes King is: “Long live the King!” But this King of kings, this son of David, has come to die.
  10. 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."
  11. Who would ever want all these screamers and haters? It turns out that Christ does.
  12. Let us rejoice, then, in this grace so that our glory may be the testimony of our conscience wherein we glory not in ourselves but in the Lord (2 Cor. 1:12).