Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well.

If you have a small view of your sin, God's grace will be small to you.

If you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.

The gospel shows a God far more holy than the legalist can bear, yet far more merciful than a humanist can conceive

All life-changing love is inconvenient.

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.

The sin under all other sins is a lack of joy in Christ.