Our prayers become less frequent and our reliance upon God dwindles when we become confident in our own perceptions. We must receive the wisdom that only comes from God through His word and by prayer.

Like salt in the earth and light in the world, the disciples were never to make life about them, but to extract and illuminate what God has done, both in this world and ultimately in the kingdom.

Jesus begins his great sermon with a description of what blessing looks like, which happens to be the exact opposite of how the world sees it.

As Jesus preaches good news of the coming kingdom, he demonstrates one of its greatest realities: the absence of every kind of disease and sickness.

All of our natural life is reoriented to the kingdom when we become disciples. As Jesus calls his first disciples, he begins by reorienting their earthly work as fishermen to their kingdom work as fishers of men.

As Jesus moves to Capernaum to begin his earthly ministry, the people of Galilee will be the first to witness the dawn of the kingdom. But that kingdom was coming in ways that couldn’t be observed by sight, only faith.

As Jesus is led to the wilderness to be tempted, the schemes of the devil all have one thing in common: forgetting God. But Jesus doing nothing apart from the Father is yet another fulfillment of all righteousness.

Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of all righteousness by John the Baptist. As His ministry begins, Jesus' divinity is confirmed as the Spirit descends upon Him and the voice of the Father expresses His pleasure in His beloved Son.

John’s baptism foreshadowed a greater division that Jesus came to bring. Those who came to it unrepentantly were warned of Jesus' greater baptism that was to come.

What is the kingdom of heaven and why was it John the Baptist’s primary reason to call people to repentance? As Jesus’ ministry begins to usher in a new kingdom, a changed mind becomes necessary to see it.