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Our Lord exhorts His disciples to cultivate strength of character—but never at the expense of brotherly love.
The exiles' return to Jerusalem embodies this metaphor.
Yet this appeal reveals something profound: the preacher refers always back to Christ as the source of all authority and influence.
First, Christ freed this ancient law from false Jewish glosses that had corrupted its meaning (Matthew 23:43-44).
The apostle Paul, when dissuading from impurity, eschewed mere physical or social arguments.
Consider the comparison: A thief who forcibly enters a strong man's house, binds him, and seizes his weapons must possess greater strength than the householder.
This is not optical biology but moral vision.
The universality of Christianity proves its Divine origin, for it alone adapts itself to the condition and wants of all humanity, coming from Him who sustains, preserves, feeds, and blesses all.
Its acquisition presents such difficulties that it is seldom truly found in our age.
It is not mere religious habit but your entire conduct—all you think, feel, desire, speak, do, and suffer.
Man's true wisdom is a pattern of God's wisdom.
This covenant embraced three distinct circles of blessing.
When Socrates drank hemlock in Athens and Caesar fell upon the Roman senate floor, their deaths remained final.
This outburst reveals the nature of evil's opposition to Christ.
All contingencies rest under the direction of God's providence.
The ground of the mistake lies in misinterpreting the word "remaineth": taken to point to rest after the sorrows of this life are finished.
Paul renounced the "wisdom of words" because human eloquence veils the gospel's truth.
Both old cloth and new cloth share the nature of cloth; similarly, old wine and new wine share the nature of wine.
One seasoned traveler, having witnessed wonders across distant lands, told his friends: "There is something more wonderful than anything I have yet known, which I still have to experience." When pressed, he replied, "It is the first five minutes after...
The Victorian expositor understood this command as operating on five essential dimensions.
Yet understand: there is no opposition between Christ and His people requiring conquest.
The accumulation of light things becomes overwhelmingly ponderous.
So too the soul suffers from inherent liability to weakness, weariness, mistrust of God, and inability to rest upon His precious promises.
This passage is prophetic of Christ, to whom "the path of life" was first opened.