1. To believe God is love and thus loves you is a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit.
  2. 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.
  3. “So loved,” then isn’t about how much but instead simply how.
  4. 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).
  5. Rightly distinguishing between law and gospel, as Paul helps us see in 2 Corinthians 3, is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
  6. God gives us the power and authority to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to burdened sinners who entrust us with their pain, guilt, and defeat.
  7. 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.
  8. Repentance is meaningless unless we are willing to acknowledge who we are: sinners needing mercy.
  9. The law had to have its way with the expert to bring him around (and back) to Abraham's response.
  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. Maybe, just maybe, our goal for 2023 should not be to live more but to die more.
  12. Despite our best efforts to avoid him, King Jesus remains very much unavoidable.