Before his fall from grace, Solomon was a type of Christ.

Loving God with all your heart is a lofty commandment. Thankfully, we also have the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, and by doing that, we practice what it means to love God.

The last statement Jesus makes recorded in Mark 8 is one that should cause us to look deep within our hearts.

What happened to the Pharisees? When they initially formed, they had the best of intentions. They wanted to live according to godly principles, separating themselves from the wickedness of the world. There’s everything right with that.

In Mark’s record of the feeding of the five thousand, we read that Jesus “commanded them all to sit down in groups on the green grass.” (Mark 6:39).

Jeremiah 31 is a pivotal chapter not only in the book itself but the entire Bible.

This thought is a counterpoint to yesterday’s where we looked at spiritual relationships being more important than biological.

At the end of today’s reading in Mark 3, we learn that Jesus’ “mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him” (v31), but his response was, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.” (v34).

In today’s reading in Mark 2, we read about the call of one of Jesus’ disciples, Matthew, the tax collector.

Have you ever wondered why Psalm 91 came up in Jesus’ wilderness temptations?

Paul’s ending words in his epistle to the Romans sum up everything he said in one simple phrase: “the obedience of faith” (Rom. 16:26). He began the epistle in the same way when he said, “through [Christ] we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations” (Rom. 1:5).

In Romans 12, the apostle Paul uses a very intriguing word in his introduction to the practical matters related to God’s righteousness.