1. One could reason that God might, at least, give the church a little worldly power.
  2. Forty-five seconds is about how long I have as a pastor leading a Sunday morning service to sit at the feet of the cross and receive Jesus’ body and blood given to me by the hands of another at the Lord’s Table.
  3. Martha’s pain is not met by a to-do list. Jesus’ reply is not that she should try harder or change her behavior
  4. Bo Giertz attained infamy in Sweden for a humble adherence to unpopular, orthodox practice and doctrine.
  5. We must be careful in how we use Bible verses to establish Scriptural truth both to others and to ourselves.
  6. God and Jeremiah may have been looking at the same person, but they were seeing very different things.
  7. A famous saying of Augustine (echoing Jesus in Luke 24:44) perhaps puts it best, “The New Testament lies concealed in the Old, the Old lies revealed in the New.”
  8. It turns out that when Elijah battled depression, God sent someone to just be with him. To comfort him.
  9. Calvary is our mountain of pardon. It is the place which reveals most definitively God’s plan to redeem and reconcile sinners to himself.
  10. Ascertaining the what and how of the Church greatly factor into the very purpose of the Church, that is, they essentially answer the question why the Church?
  11. Questions of our purpose and significance as a church abound with fewer and fewer people in the pews.
  12. This is an edited excerpt from “The Pastoral Prophet: Meditations on the Book of Jeremiah” written by Steve Kruschel (1517 Publishing, 2019).