Life of Christ (9)
  1. No amount of ritual, sacrifice, devotion, or money could ever do what Jesus of Nazareth was sent to accomplish.
  2. We can do nothing to warrant entry into the kingdom of God nor are we getting in if we think a seat at God’s table is something to which we are entitled.
  3. Christ shows up in the middle of our storms and our nightmares. That’s where he sets up shop.
  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. Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
  6. For sinners who cannot seem to get out of their own way, Dane brings to bear the gospel of Christ’s heart, which aerates one’s spiritual lungs with undiluted grace.
  7. But Jesus didn’t see it that way. He saw his arrest not as the kingdom’s program being thwarted but as it being “fulfilled.”
  8. Despite what the Pharisees believed and advertised, Jesus was not intent upon deconstructing the fundamental tenets of the Old Testament law. Actually, he proceeds to do just the opposite.
  9. Jesus’s touch of this leper is the touchstone of the gospel itself. It’s a living parable of his entire ministry.