Gavin Dunbar: Follow After Charity 

“What moves Abraham to start the journey? It is not unselfish noble altruism, but need, longing, and desire for the blessing God so abundantly promises him.” 

Stuart Dunnan: Don’t Burn Your Bridges with God 

“Like children at school, we are tempted to ‘obey the rules’ and not to embrace the rules, internalize and understand them. In this way, we constantly fool ourselves, burn bridges, and become false martyrs, failing almost on purpose to see that one true way of life that the rules can teach and defend.” 

Mark Michael: Tearing Down Walls 

“If Jesus is who he says he is, the Messiah, the Son of God, then he has the power to rewrite the laws. His coming marks the dawn of a new age, the kingdom of God, he calls it — the reign of God on earth. And in this new age, there are new standards that represent the new purposes and vision that God is bringing to life.” 

Edward Pusey: The Offering God Requires 

“As the love, which one may pretend to have for God, was not real love, if a person does not love his brother, so likewise, sacrifice was not an offering to God at all, while one withhold from God that offering which God does most require, that is, the oblation of one’s own self.” 

Origen: It Has Been Accomplished 

“The faith of Abraham, therefore, can be reasonably compared to the faith of those who believe that God has raised the Lord Jesus. He believed that it would be, we believe that it has been accomplished.” 

F.W. Robertson: Ear Open to Every Tone 

“He had an ear open for every tone of wail; a heart ready to respond to every species of need. Specially the Redeemer of the soul, He was yet as emphatically the ‘Saviour of the body.’” 

 Abraham’s Faith 

“Are we too proud to fall upon our faces at the wonder of God’s call to an old man and his barren wife? God uses their bodies, although as good as dead, for maternity and promise. It is an old story. God promises that they will be the parents of a multitude of nations and kings, exceedingly fruitful. And we inherit the promise.”  

Jeff Boldt: The Making of Abram’s Name   

“While procreation brings children to life, Jesus’ Resurrection brings them back to life, eternally. Tomb fulfills womb; Resurrection fulfills procreation. What is spiritual about this is that God first resurrects our souls –– that’s what it means to be born again — and then resurrection spreads to our bodies. Evangelism is a supremely procreative act.”   

Gene Schlesinger: Timeless, Just Not the Way You Think 

“As St. Paul makes clear, Gentile Christians are inheritors, but not supplanters, of the covenant made with Abraham (Rom. 11; Gal. 3). Invited by Christ Jesus to a new covenant with God, we can indeed claim the Ten Commandments as our own, but not in such a way as to wrest them away from their original setting and purpose.” 

Nick Comiskey: Leaving Ourselves Behind 

“Luther needed something else, however, to make faith not just unreflective but deeply personal — to be sure the promises of God applied to him. He found this assurance by likewise looking to the sacraments and understanding them in light of what Cary calls ‘the double structure of God’s word.’” 

Sarah Puryear: Baptism, A New Birth into a Living Hope  

“Baptism is a similar sort of encounter: God in Christ drawing us up out of the waters of sin and death that threaten to quench our life; God in Christ tenderly embracing us as he calls us by name; God in Christ infusing us with new life that is infinitely stronger than death, and that he promises will be everlasting.” 

Micah Latimer-Dennis: On Dogs and Altar Rails 

“We admit we are dogs, unworthy as Gentiles and those who chronically forget God’s promises to the Jews to sit at God’s table, and yet we go on to ask for God’s food all the same, trusting that our host is merciful.” 

Clint Wilson: Every Idol Demands Human Sacrifice 

“Christians must ponder a deeper question in our times: How are we to square our notion of freedom and rights with a God who in Christ shows us true freedom precisely by being tread upon, and spit upon, and hoisted up on a cross for the life — and freedom — of the world?” 

Simon Oliver: Episcopacy, Priesthood, and the Priesthood of the Church 

“The sacrificial offering of Christ on the cross is the manifestation of the eternal offering of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit. In other words, the sacrificial offering of Christ is not something that just happens to take place in first-century Palestine as a reaction to human sin; it belongs to very trinitarian life of God.” 

Charlie Clauss: Remembrance — God’s Promises 

“It is not long before voices are heard complaining that all this talk of sacrifice and blood, is ‘barbaric,’ that God would not do such a thing. The cross stands at the center of the view that Jesus is a new Passover lamb, and if you reject his sacrifice, if you reject his Passover, you are rejecting the core idea that God is at work in this to free us. How much of this is because we cannot see ourselves as an oppressed people?”