God's Love for us

Jesus Healing the Sick If you wanted to summarize the ministry of Jesus Christ in a single activity, beyond His teaching and beyond His discipleship of the twelve, it would be this: He healed people. Everywhere He went. Everyone who came to Him. Matthew 4:23 states it with extraordinary breadth: "Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in their synagogues proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness among the people." Every disease. Every sickness. There was no condition too severe, no illness too advanced, no person too marginalized to receive the healing attention of Jesus when they came to Him in need. The healing ministry of Jesus is not a peripheral or incidental feature of the Gospel accounts, it is woven into the fabric of every chapter, present in every phase of His ministry from the beginning in Galilee to the final moments before His arrest in the garden. And the healing stories are not merely impressive supernatural events to be ...

The Sermon on the Mount If you had to choose a single passage of Scripture that contains the most concentrated, most comprehensive and most revolutionary vision of human life ever articulated, the passage that has shaped more people, changed more hearts, inspired more art and literature and social movements and personal transformation than any other document in human history, most careful readers would point to Matthew 5-7. The Sermon on the Mount. Three chapters in the Gospel of Matthew that contain teaching so radical, so counter-cultural and so personally demanding that C.S. Lewis once said that the only honest responses to it are either to follow Jesus as Lord or to conclude that the one who spoke these words was not a good man but something far more or far less than that. The Sermon on the Mount is not a collection of moral advice from a wise religious teacher. It is the manifesto of a new Kingdom, the announcement of an entirely different way of being human, organized around an...

Jesus Ministry in Galilee When God chose to begin the most significant ministry in human history He did not begin it in Jerusalem, the religious capital of Israel, the city of the temple, the place where the religious establishment was concentrated and where the most theologically sophisticated audience could be found. He began it in Galilee, a region that the religious establishment of Jerusalem looked down upon, a place of mixed ethnicity and diverse cultural influence that sat on the margins of Jewish religious respectability. John 1:46 captures the contemporary attitude toward Galilee's most famous town: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" And yet it was precisely in this overlooked, underestimated, marginal region that Jesus spent the majority of His public ministry. The towns of Capernaum, Bethsaida, Korazin, Cana and Nain became the primary theaters of the most extraordinary ministry the world has ever witnessed. The fishermen of Galilee became the foundation...

The Wedding in Cana: Jesus' First Miracle John 2:11 records a remarkable statement about the miracle at the Wedding in Cana: "What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him." The first of the signs. John's Gospel presents seven signs, seven miracles carefully selected to reveal who Jesus is, and the very first of those signs did not happen in a synagogue or a temple. It did not involve a dramatic healing before a crowd or a bold public confrontation with religious leaders. It happened at a wedding party. When the wine ran out. This is deeply characteristic of how Jesus operates, revealing His glory in the ordinary, the domestic and the everyday. The God of the universe made His first public display of miraculous power not in a setting designed to impress the powerful but in a setting designed to serve the embarrassed. And what He did in that moment, and why He did it, reveals s...

Jesus Calls His Disciples There are moments in Scripture that stop you because of their breathtaking simplicity. Not the dramatic parting of seas or the fire falling from heaven or the resurrection of the dead, but moments of such quiet, such ordinariness and such radical consequence that their very understatedness becomes the most striking thing about them. The calling of the first disciples is one of those moments. A man walks along the shore of a lake. He sees two brothers casting nets into the water. He says four words to them, "Follow me" and everything changes. They drop their nets immediately. They leave their boats. They leave their father. They leave the only life they have known. And they follow a carpenter from Nazareth into an adventure that will take them to the ends of the earth and ultimately cost most of them their lives. The calling of the disciples is not merely an interesting historical episode from the beginning of Jesus' ministry. It is one of the ...