God sees us as we are, loves us as we are, and accepts us as we are. But by His grace, He does not leave us as we are.

The targets of this story are not wayward sinners but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. H wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them.

Discipleship is not an option. Jesus says that if anyone would come after me, he must follow me.

We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus' miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.

God's reckless grace is our greatest hope.

Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.

To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.