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We’ve all felt the pull to add one more pious act—fast a little longer, pray a little harder—convinced the right combination will finally make us right before God. In Matthew 9, John’s disciples bring that same assumption directly to Jesus, and his answer reframes not just the practice of fasting but the question of what season we’re actually living in.
We’ve sung it since childhood: He’s got the whole world in his hands. Yet when the personal “you and me” gets stripped away, what’s left is a distant abstraction. In Matthew 8 a leper kneels and forces the real question—does the Lord who can hold everything actually will to hold him?
Even as a Christian, you can feel the yips—that moment when shame from old sins creeps back in, making you wonder if you’re really free, if God’s forgiveness is truly yours. Romans 6:23 speaks directly into that weight: the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We crave freedom, but Bob Dylan was right when he sang, “You Gotta Serve Somebody.” No matter how strong that craving, we’ll find ourselves serving either righteousness or unrighteousness.
When we want vengeance, we want to get back—but Isaiah 1:24–25 shows a God who wants to get back to *good*, and that difference is harder to hold onto than it sounds when the anger is righteous and the wrong is real.
When God's holiness draws near, our first instinct is often to back away—to put some distance between ourselves and the One whose law shows us how unholy we are. That's exactly what Israel does in Exodus 20 after hearing the Ten Commandments: they tremble at the mountain and tell Moses, “You speak to us… but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.”
Pastor Tim takes us to the question “Since we are redeemed by grace alone, through Christ alone, must we still do good works and obey God’s Word?” from the New City Catechism. We all need to think about what it means to have faith in the only one who can offer us true salvation.
Pastor Tim takes us to the question “What do justification and sanctification mean?” from the New City Catechism. We all need to think about what it means to have faith in the only one who can offer us true salvation.
How do we come before God when our prayers so easily become empty phrases, desperate demands, or distant formalities? In Matthew 6, Jesus says our Father knows what we need before we ask, then gives His disciples words for approaching Him: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
In our sinful human nature we’re all hypocrites—quick to see the masks on everyone else, almost never on ourselves. Jesus meets that very tendency in Matthew 7:12 with a rule most people already know by heart: whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.
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