God disciplines Jonah in order to correct his heart for the lost. Do we have a heart for the lost? Or are we too running away from our holy mandate?”

Jonah stands alone as the prophet whose doubts turned to disobedience and thus leads us to recognize the difference between doubting God’s call and disobeying God’s command.

The author of Jonah wants us to remember that “God’s chosen people are meant to be a blessing to the nations and offer intercession so that God’s covenant blessing can go out to the them.”

Markus Barth says, “the logic of the argument [of the Divine Armor] is this: if these arms are spiritual, and if they are sufficient for God and Jesus Christ—they will certainly be good enough for the saints.

Tim Mackie says: “The gospel of Jesus enters the first-century situation and transforms it. We read Ephesians faithfully when we read it to gain wisdom for how the gospel seeks to enter our situation and transform it!”

Paul subverts the notion that the ordering of the household should be for the benefit of those in power by setting in parallel the “headship” of the husband in relation to his wife and that of Christ in relation to the church.

We have a choice as to what our influences are going to be. If we submit ourselves to the influence of the Spirit, we will be filled up with a life of the new creation.

Our holy lives ought to resist corrupted practices and replace them with life-giving patterns of conduct that draw on and radiate the resurrection power of Jesus.

Borrowing what we did for the last week of Advent, we stayed on a diverted course from our normal dive into Ephesians by recapping Ephesians 2 — especially as it pertains to what we need for a faithful, abiding 2023.