“Which of the two sons did what his father wanted?” “The first,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the kingdom of God ahead of you.
The Lord isn’t slow to keep his promise, not slow in the way some people understand it. Instead, he’s being patient with you. He doesn’t want anyone to be destroyed. He wants everyone to turn away from their sins.
When the law was introduced, sin got worse, because now people were doing things that they knew were wrong. But when sin got worse, God poured out an even greater abundance of grace.
We know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are governed by the law. Its purpose is to silence every excuse and hold the whole world accountable to God.
“His master replied, ‘I will judge you by your own words, you worthless slave! So you knew that I’m a hard man? You knew that I take out what I didn’t put in and that I harvest what I didn’t plant?
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at a tax collection booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him. So Matthew got up and followed him.
“When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that other people will see them. Truly I tell you, that’s all the reward they’ll get.
Truly I tell you, heaven and earth will disappear before the smallest letter disappears from the Law. Not even the smallest mark of a pen will disappear until everything the Law says happens.