There are two opposite wrong postures toward sin: overconfidence that breeds callousness, or despair that gives up the fight entirely. Consider Paul’s warnings from Israel’s wilderness failures as a corrective aimed at both.

How does a whole group of God’s people slide into apostasy? This chapter is deliberately placed out of chronological order to make its point land harder. Consider the tribe of Dan’s slow drift into idolatry.

What would you be willing to do to save someone else’s soul? Consider Paul’s own radical flexibility, becoming all things to all people, so that some might be saved.

Some of us love danger, the thrill of climbing, guns, mountain biking, while others just endure necessary risks like driving or crossing the road. Consider Jesus’s closing parable of the Sermon on the Mount, the wise and foolish builders facing a storm neither of them can avoid.

Ever known someone who went hypothermic? The body starts shutting down, stops feeling the cold, and just wants to sleep. That picture of numbed need opens Jesus’s teaching on praying for daily bread, forgiveness, and deliverance.

Pulling weeds for hours in a childhood vegetable garden, especially the notorious dock weed that always seemed to come back, is a fitting picture for Jesus’s command not to be anxious, and how worry keeps growing back if we don’t deal with its root.

Imagine you’re captaining a boat with your child aboard when a storm hits and another vessel signals distress. That impossible choice frames what it means to pray first for God’s name, kingdom, and will rather than our own agenda.

What would you be willing to do for a million dollars? Consider how much we’re prepared to sacrifice, time, relationships, integrity, for something we treasure. Then turn to Jesus’s teaching on storing up treasure in heaven instead of on earth.

How do you approach someone with real authority over you, someone with the right to take everything you own, even your life? That question opens the Lord’s Prayer, setting up just how remarkable it is that we’re invited to call this God Father.

Will-worship is an old Puritan term for worship aimed at God but shaped by human will rather than his own instructions, and the Reformation was fought largely over exactly this question. Consider Judges 17 as an early Israelite case study in worship gone wrong.