1. You are not alone if you find it difficult to wrap your mind around the auspices of the Old Testament sacrificial system.
  2. Many people have struggled to understand Leviticus and Old Testament worship in general. Here is a handbook or map to navigate these subjects, and to see their relationship to Christ and his saving work.
  3. Past, present, and future are tied together in Christ.
  4. 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.
  5. Human history, our history, is the story of two Adams with two very different encounters with the devil.
  6. 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.
  7. Some explanations are better than others, but they remain our explanations—except if we had some perspective from outside, above, and behind nature.
  8. Unprompted, without any warning, for no reason at all, without any instigation say, "I love you." And that will wash over your parents like a beautiful absolution.
  9. 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.
  10. As disciples of Jesus, our righteousness cannot be performed before others, because our righteousness was already performed by Jesus.
  11. When I finished this book, I loved the Bible, and the Bible’s author, even more. And I can’t imagine a better endorsement than that.
  12. Ash Wednesday's purpose is not to motivate our resolve to redouble our efforts to do better.