“God reveals Himself. He reveals Himself through Himself. He reveals Himself. … One may sum up the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity briefly and simply by saying that God is the One who reveals Himself.”
—Karl Barth Church Dogmatics I/1
Who is Your Faith Founded on? (1 Corinthians 2:1-5)
“A sermon that just informs the mind can give people things to do after they go home, but a sermon that moves the heart from loving career or acclaim or one’s own independence to loving God and his Son changes listeners on the spot.”
— Tim Keller
God Chooses the People and the Messenger (1 Corinthians 1:26-2:5)
“It is not that God cannot, or will not, save the affluent. But for Paul, the glory of the gospel does not lie there; rather, it lies in God’s mercy toward the very people whom most of the affluent tend to write off - the foolish, the weak, the despised. Such people do not fit well into the “suburban captivity of the church.”
— Gordon Fee, Commentary, First Epistle to the Corinthians
Jesus Catches His Fish and Feeds His Sheep (John 21:1-14)
“The LORD is exalted, for he dwells on high; he will fill Zion with justice and righteousness, and he will be the stability of your times, abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is Zion’s treasure.”
—Isaiah 33:5-6
Peace Be With You (John 20:19-31)
“‘We do not know… how can we know the way?’
Courageous master of the awkward question,
You spoke the words the others dared not say
And cut through their evasion and abstraction.
Oh doubting Thomas, father of my faith,
You put your finger on the nub of things
We cannot love some disembodied wraith,
But flesh and blood must be our king of kings.
Your teaching is to touch, embrace, anoint,
Feel after Him and find Him in the flesh.
Because He loved your awkward counter-point
The Word has heard and granted you your wish.
Oh place my hands with yours, help me divine
The wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.”
—Malcolm Guite
The Work is Finished; Everything has Changed (John 20:11-18)
“The finality of Christ’s death on the cross - which left to itself, could be so soothing to us, in the somber glow of our wisdom and tragedy’s pathos - has been unceremoniously undone, and we are suddenly denied the consolations of pity and reverence, resignation and recognition, and are thrown out upon the turbid seas of boundless hope and boundless hunger.”
—David Bentley Hart
The Power of the Resurrection to Transform (John 20:1-10)
“The resurrection [of Jesus Christ] cannot be part of any history unless it is the center and turning point.”
—Lesslie Newbigin, The Light Has Come
Look to the Cross (John 19:16b-42)
“Six days shall you labor
The seventh is the Lord's
In six He made the earth and all the heavens
But He rested on the seventh
God rested
He said that it was finished
And the seventh day, He blessed it
God rested.”
—Andrew Peterson
Behold Our King (John 19:1-16a)
“Lev.17:11: ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I, I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your soul…’ In the [Biblical] case of sacrifice, the offerer tends to think, ‘I am putting this blood on the altar for the Lord.’ But here, the Lord turns that idea on its head. As scholar Baruch Schwartz explains in his essay “Prohibitions Concerning the ‘Eating’ of Blood”: What our clause does, in its unique, metaphorically graphic way, is to take a set phrase, the ‘placing’ of the blood on the altar, and to reverse the conceptual direction of the action: ‘It is not you who are placing the blood on the altar for me, for my benefit, but rather the opposite: it is I who have placed it there for you—for your benefit."‘ In his mercy and grace, the Lord has provided a way for guilty sinners to be forgiven.”
— Jay Sklar
Pilot's Three Questions (John 18:28-40)
“The scale of the reversal cannot be exaggerated: when Jesus stands before Pilate… he must seem from the vantage of all the noble wisdom of the empire and the age... merely absurd… But in the light of the resurrection… the mockery now redounds upon all kings and emperors, whose finery and symbols of status are revealed to be nothing more than rags and brambles beside the majesty of God’s Son, beside this servile shape in which God displays his infinite power to be where he will be; all the rulers of the earth cannot begin to surpass in grandeur this beauty of the God who ventures forth to make even the dust his glory.”
— David Bentley Hart