1. Certainly, Jesus’ parable provides a dire warning for where, not wealth, per se, but obsession with it, will lead.
  2. The reign of God in Christ compels us to pray for all in authority, while at the same time our praying for them calls into the question all the idolatries that arise from the exercise of this authority.
  3. This is why Paul is still an “example” for us. If this is what God in Christ can do with “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence," imagine what God in Christ can do with you and me.
  4. Love bids us to choose life, always life, because the love of Jesus has already set us free for a life beyond our wildest imagination.
  5. We set our minds on things above, but our feet are firmly planted in the stuff of earth, our hands open to the treasure which is our neighbor.
  6. What pressures or dangers are these particular people, in this particular place, facing right now which keep them from being “rooted and built up” in Christ? What is keeping them from “abounding in thanksgiving”?
  7. What might be a unique challenge of this text is how our preaching of it might itself resonate with its mystery. It goes to a broader question: How can we retain a sense of the “mysterious” in our preaching of mysterious texts?
  8. Paul is giving thanks for the reality that the gospel grows just as much in the little places as it does in the centers of power.
  9. The glimpse of this final vision of healing has healed us before, it heals us here and now, and it will heal us again.
  10. What you are doing for your hearers is sparking their imagination to live in, to dwell in, the images you are conjuring in their mind’s eye.
  11. This voice of Jesus is the same voice which now beckons us to see anew how God in Christ is at work anywhere and everywhere.
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