“Where is Christ in this section of Scripture? What does this have to do with the ultimate purpose of Scripture: that I may know Him and Him crucified?” If you ask and answer that question, you have been spiritually disciplined in the right way. And it won’t matter if you got through one verse or a hundred.
For those Christians who feel the tug to read great literature, know that it is not a waste of your time. These books will only deepen your appreciation for the Scriptures and will open your eyes to a fuller, more profound vision of reality and the God who loves you.
We are invited to entrust everything to the one who accomplished what we could not: living and bleeding and dying and rising again, so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). To put it another way, when it comes to the kingdom of God, there’s no room for DIY’ers. Best leave it to the professionals.

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Luther neither removed the Apocrypha from the Bible nor discouraged its use. Rather, he received and preserved the ancient distinction inherited from the fathers: the Apocrypha is valuable, edifying, and worthy of reading, but it is not Holy Scripture and therefore cannot serve as the foundation of Christian doctrine.
There are important historical reasons for making a distinction between ministry and vocation.
It appeared everything would work out perfectly when Ivan the Great married Sophia Palaiologos. But when inheritance was discussed the problems arrived.
When the enemies of your faith surround you, don’t look to your own wits and wisdom.
The wicked emperor, Andronikos, thought he could manipulate a human prophecy in order to save his kingdom. If only he understood which blood saves!
Lent exists because we are forgetful creatures. We forget how hungry we really are.
Pride builds identities that leave no room for grace.
Worship never existed as escape from the world, but preparation for life within it.
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.
Christian faith is never a solitary possession. When the congregation confesses, the old speak for the young, the strong for the weak, and the clear-voiced for the trembling.
The entire history of Protestantism is downstream of a goldsmith in Mainz figuring out how to cast identical pieces of lead type in less than a minute.
Baptism does not promise us chocolates or flowers, but something far greater: life in Christ.