1. Sometimes it’s important to go far away to learn of holy places back home.
  2. For Luther, those who refuse Christ as a curse want their sin removed not in Christ but in themselves.
  3. When we own up to our sin, our Father is not scandalized, and his response is not to reconsider his calling us.
  4. God is mercy. He was mercy then. He’s mercy now. God showed them His glory, if only a reflection, in the face of Moses.
  5. There is perhaps no better observation about the nature of anxiety and depression than its fundamental desire for avoidance.
  6. The firestorm of the Reformation which turned Europe upside-down was not Luther’s doing. It was the Word, and the Spirit working through it.
  7. The world we inhabit is wrong in so many ways, and a holistic approach to this “wrongness” traces its cause both to sin itself and to the effects of sin.
  8. You might not know it, but every Christian hopes for the day when their faith will die. Really. I promise. Faith’s death is our celebration.
  9. Grace remits sin, and peace quiets the conscience. Sin and conscience torment us, but Christ has overcome these fiends now and forever.
  10. Our only claim to fame is that we have been claimed by a God who is consistently drawn to losers!
  11. Christians do have a hope that those who sleep in death will be awakened and their joy will never end, and we yearn for that day.