The first two words of the Lord’s Prayer do most of the work. Pastor Adam argues God as Father is among the most radical religious ideas ever proposed, builds it from Romans 8, Galatians 4 and Hebrews 4, and asks what prayer is for if the Father already knows.

“I will not leave you as orphans” only means something if the condition is real. Pastor Adam inventories what an orphan actually lacks, name, history, belonging, legitimacy, and argues Jesus is naming a spiritual condition that shows up in people whose households were fine.

Pilate tells Jesus he has the power to free him or crucify him, and Jesus relocates the whole question. Pastor Adam opens The Politics of Jesus by dismantling the assumption most believers hold quietly: that Jesus’ political views happen to match their own.

The son rehearses a speech asking to be hired as a servant, and never gets to finish it. Dr. James Smith III preaches the prodigal son on Father’s Day, on a father who was watching the road, and on an older brother who has to ask a servant what is happening in his own house.

The word of the Lord comes to Jonah a second time, and a city turns around on one sentence of warning. Pastor Adam works Jonah 3 around the word “if,” argues that nobody knows in advance who will repent, and puts the closing question plainly: perhaps you have an obedience problem.

Greater love has no one than this. Harry Wilson takes John 15 out of abstraction by way of his own mother, a single parent raising three children in small apartments, and draws a line between building a resume of interesting things and bearing fruit that actually abides.

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