It is death that deserves derision, not the disciple who reaches through sorrow for his Lord.
Illness is not romantic. It is not a test, a metaphor, nor a blessing in disguise.
The unity of God’s people is grounded not in lineage nor land but in the promise of the coming Christ.

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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”?
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
We can see this as a foreshadowing of how the LORD always comes to His people—the people do not come to Him. So, it is God who sent His Son to us, His Promised One, up close and personal.
But it is not always helpful to create tidy categories of good and bad and to say, “Stop being ‘a Martha’ and do a better job of being ‘a Mary.’” That is a dangerous sermon to preach. In doing so, we can fall into the very thing we see Martha doing.
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?
Moses is no Jesus but he, like us, is saved by Him. The law cannot enter the promised land, and yet the true and greater promised land is occupied by nothing but lawbreakers.
[Because] of the relationship of presence the LORD has with His people, His holiness ‘gets on them,’ and, as a result, this is what their life now looks like because the holy LORD is their God.
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.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is both a call to faith in Jesus and a call to love our neighbor.
Following Jesus, we gimp our way down the dark and slippery paths of life. As we do, we discover, ironically, that the longer we follow him, the weaker we become, and the more we lean on our Lord.
How do we preach a text of exhortation while keeping the sermon Gospel-centered?
At first, one might think bones would strictly be associated with death, but in the Old Testament the most significant references to “bones” are associated with life and even resurrection from death.