God’s heart is for all people, evidenced by Christ’s substitutionary death and role as mediator for all people. Therefore, our hearts and our prayers must also be for all people.

The Son of God suffered as a man, offering up agonized prayers to God, so that He might learn obedience and be made perfect for His role as our great high priest and the savior of all who obey His summons to faith.

Jesus Christ is a legitimate high priest to offer sacrifice for our sins since he is qualified by His true human nature, His status as Son of God and His appointment by God to His priestly office.

Through our Great High Priest, Jesus Christ, who shared in all of our temptations without sinning, Christians can boldly approach God’s throne by prayer, knowing we can receive mercy and find grace for every trail and temptation that we face.

The writing on the wall warns us that pride & short-sighted interests must all give way in the triumph of our Lord Jesus Christ, the only weighed, measured and worthy king, who calls his exiled people to order our lives around allegiance to him & his advancing kingdom.

Because the Bible is the very Word of the Living, All-Seeing God, who will one day call each of us to account, it shares His power to be able to uncover and expose the hidden thoughts and intentions of our hearts, protecting us from the great dangers of deception, disbelief and disobedience.

Professing believers need to strive to enter God’s eternal rest by believing and persevering, since the Old Testament clearly shows that neither the Sabbath rest nor the rest of the Promised Land was the ultimate rest, that rest found in Jesus Christ alone, entered by faith alone.

In light of all God’s mercies to rebels, Christians are summoned to present themselves as sacrifices to God by refusing to be squeezed into the world’s mold and by cooperating with God to renew our minds so that they are responsive to God’s will.

When God answered the heart desire of Simeon and Anna to see the Lord's Christ by leading them to recognize baby Jesus in the Temple, they testified and prophesied about the One who would bring salvation to both Jews and Gentiles and whose life would divide the human race into believers and nonbelievers.

Because each of us faces a daily battle against unbelief leading to disobedience and even falling away from the Living God (as exemplified so clearly in the Exodus generation), we need to welcome into our lives those who will exhort us about the deceitfulness of sin, and we need to become God’s instruments of loving intervention in the lives of our brothers and sisters.