Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.

You dont fall into love. You commit to it. Love is saying I will be there no matter what.

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.

People only get in the afterlife what they have most wanted-either to have God as Savior and Master or to be their own Saviors and Masters.

Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are looking for a marriage partner who will 'fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.' And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to a deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry.

Just because we don't see a reason for evil and suffering doesn't mean there's not a reason for it.

The reason the stone was rolled away on Jesus's tomb was not so that Jesus could get out, but so that we could get in.