Covenant community is like air. We don't miss it until we need it.

A Christian is one who stops working to be saved, not one who stops working!

People are messy; therefore, relationships will be messy. Don't be surprised by messiness.

The world says you are loved because of what you do. Jesus says you can now do all things because you are loved.

To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.

A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.

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.