Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.

By focusing too myopically on what we want God to do on our behalf, we may miss the significance of what he has already done.

Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.

Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness - and certainly not love.

Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.

Jesus announced a great reversal of values in His Sermon on the Mount, elevating not the rich or attractive, but rather the poor, the persecuted, and those who mourn.

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less