“And when completely emptied, destitute, and lost, He, God, the great kinsman redeemer, chose to save her. Brothers and sisters, just the same Jesus Christ is our kinsman redeemer. He alone has the right to take away the spoils and the ruins all of our loss and our pain and the alienation and brokenness of sin. And it is through Christ alone by His sacrifice that our stains were washed clean that he bore our curse upon that cross and His death made satisfaction for us, all so that we could be reconciled to God the Father – by no merit of our own – but because of the mercy of our Lord. And it is in this complete, and life-giving grace that we all do indeed get to live the greatest story ending of all time: life everlasting.”

"Like the early Christians, let our love – and the giving which is a sign of that love – be the means by which treasure and heart come together, and by which this broken world comes to know the generosity and joy of God himself"

"Angels dwell in the immediate Presence of God and play a role in God's providential care of creation. They are, as the Swiss theologian Karl Barth put it, the crown witness to the glory of God."

“At the end of all things that great dragon who is our enemy, the one who deceives us, the one who accuses us and holds our sin and shame in our face, the one who is opposed to all that is good and true and beautiful in the world will be cast down by God’s heavenly army and destroyed once and for all.”

“Do we hear His great call to join Him in His work, to pull back the veil and allow the world to know heaven? Because He is the King, but he’s also our Daddy who loves each of us beyond measure and deeply desires for the entire world to accept such love.”

"Our desire as Christians must always be give God the first-fruits in everything – not just in our worship, but also as we seek to be formed as His disciples and to serve as His agents in the world. Nevertheless, our worship is the font and the wellspring."

"We can see the total, transforming love of Christ that has now encapsulated, and is overflowing out of the 60-year-old, end of his ministry Paul. He isn’t bitter. He isn’t griping about being in prison, or his living conditions, and he’s not even using his apostolic authority in the letter – like he has for most of his ministry. The spirit that’s within Paul as a fellow Christian is just overflowing in his letter: in his grace, in his dealing with these hard issues, in his love for Philemon, in his love for the slave turned brother in Chris, Onesimus. It’s the transcending nature of the Christian life. Remember that Paul wrote in Galatians, 'There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.'"

"As sinners, our inclination is not to want to worship and we can find all kinds of rationalizations for not doing it. ‘The weather’s really nice today’, ‘I really had a hard night last night’, ‘You know, the sermon’s probably going to be deadly dull – I saw that Michael Petty was preaching this Sunday’. We can rationalize and rationalize away. And so for us, worship is a discipline. It’s important for all of us to get to the place as Christians where we recognize that we need to worship God – even though we might not feel like it or we might not want to, we need to - because worship is part of God’s therapy for we who are prideful and self-absorbed. We need the therapy."

“Arrogance is hateful before the Lord and before the people, and injustice is out of tune to both.”

-Ecclesiasticus 10:7

"Jesus calls His followers to the same standard: to strive, to be diligent, to be active, and to be earnest, neglecting no opportunity to participate in the unveiling of His Kingdom."