This is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of Fear Not: How the Gospel Disrupts Our Deepest Anxieties by Luke Kjolhaug (1517 Publishing, 2026).
We draw near because Christ our Mediator has gone where we never could, and he has brought us with him.
The Israelite God was different from all the other gods, thus, the worship of Yahweh differed from that of all other gods.

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God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.
Prayer is only possible because Jesus has given you access to the Father through His shed blood. Prayer is a gift purchased for you by Christ.
The life we are trying to manage, improve, and secure is not something to be mastered. It is something to be surrendered. And this is where everything changes. Because in Christ, the approval we are seeking has already been spoken.
I pray my children see God’s faithfulness not in the riches of this world, but in the riches of grace through Christ Jesus.
There are important historical reasons for making a distinction between ministry and vocation.
No one is harder to convert than a religious expert.
Do not disregard Luther’s early disputations, but appreciate their specificity and recognize their pastoral and theological continuity with his later works.
"Every one must stand and give account before God for himself; and no one can excuse himself by the action or decision of another, whether less or more.”
David shows us what happens to a man when his resurrection begins.
Faith holds on to the truth of who Jesus is revealed to be, despite our sometimes incongruent experience with God.
Pride builds identities that leave no room for grace.
A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.