God's Grace is Sufficient (Matthew 6:25-34)

“‘Be not anxious for the morrow’: either that is cruel mockery for the poor and wretched, the very people Jesus is talking to who, humanly speaking, really will starve if they do not make provision to-day… or it is the unique proclamation of the gospel of the glorious liberty of the children of God, who have a Father in heaven, a Father who has given his beloved Son. How shall not God with him also freely give us all things?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Fasting to Feast with Our Father (Matthew 6:16-18)

“In spite of errors and abuses, Christians in the past had sound intuitions about the centrality of fasting in the Christian life. In the early Church, fasting was not an isolated practice reserved for a day or a season. It was a clue to all Christian living, a perspective on the whole of discipleship. To be a Christian meant to participate in a great feast. It meant also to observe a great fast.”

—Peter J. Leithart

Our Father (Matthew 6:9-15)

“The simple, possessive pronoun, ‘your’ on Sinai, and now the simple possessive pronoun ‘our’ on the New Testament mountain, join the people of God to God. God was not introduced to Israel, coldly and formally as ‘Yahweh, the God,’ but warmly as ‘Yahweh, your God.’ And now in the same spirit, God is given to us not only as the Father, but as ‘Our Father.’ The ‘our’ means we belong and are at home. It is a possessive pronoun, meaning that God the Father owns us yet gives himself to us so that he is ours and we are his. In the simple word ‘our’ is the joy of the whole gospel. We will never be able to calculate the honor that has been done us by being allowed to say, ‘Our Father.’’’

—F.D. Bruner, Matthew, A Commentary

Dead to Sin Alive to God (Romans 6:5-11)

“It might have been possible, we could say, before Christ rose from the dead, for someone to wonder whether creation was a lost cause.  If the creature constantly acted to uncreate itself, and with itself to uncreate the rest of creation, did this not mean that God’s handiwork was flawed beyond hope of repair? … Before God raised Jesus from the dead, the hope that we call ‘gnostic,’ the hope for redemption from creation rather than hope for the redemption of creation, might have appeared to be the only possible hope. ‘But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead…’ (1 Cor. 15:20). That fact rules out those other possibilities, for in the second Adam the first is rescued.  The deviance of his will, its fateful leaning towards death, has not been allowed to uncreate what God created.”

— Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order

Perfect Love (Matthew 5:43-48)

“Nine Ascending steps of loving one’s enemy: 1.) take no evil initiative; 2.) do not avenge another’s evil; 3.) Be quiet; 4.) suffer wrongfully; 5.) surrender to the evil doer more than he demands; 6.) do not hate the evil doer; 7.) Love him; 8.) Do him good; 9.) Entreat God on his behalf.”

—John Chrysostom, 5th Century Church Father

The Gravity of Human Speech (Matthew 5:33-37)

“I once heard the worst thing
A man can do is draw a hungry crowd
To tell everyone his name, pride and confidence
But leaving out his doubt
I’m not sure I bought those words
When I was young, I knew most everything
These words have never meant as much to anyone
As they now mean to me
The weight of lies will bring you down
And follow you to every town
‘Cause nothing happens here
That doesn’t happen there
So when you run, make sure you run
To something and not away from
‘Cause lies don’t need an aeroplane
To chase you down”

— The Avett Brothers “The Weight of Lies”