1. It’s the notion of mercy that leads us to the atonement, and it is the atonement that provides a foundational basis for the justification of sinners.
  2. One of the primary reasons we do not have to fear the future is because the future is certain in Christ.
  3. Increasingly, to forgive is seen as winking at evil, as shrugging one’s moral shoulders, and as being complicit.
  4. A group of unassuming apostles was given a graphic illustration of how the Lord would use them to turn the world right-side-up through the upside-down logic of grace.
  5. Being the baptized just may be the last, great resistance.
  6. Good, we tend to think, is the absence of evil. But this reversal of the formula can only have disastrous consequences.
  7. There is only one antidote to the venom of sin and death: the Savior who becomes the serpent so that every snake-bitten-sinner might live.
  8. God is consistently rooting us in reality—both what is seen and unseen—because that is where he is.
  9. To “trust in God in trial” means we fight our battles by kneeling and praying to “the Holy One of Israel,” who works out our deliverance by himself.
  10. We bring nothing with us that contributes to the preaching or the hearing of God’s promise to us.