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.
The confessors at Augsburg remind us that every generation of Christians is called to bear witness to the gospel amid the challenges and pressures of its own age. As they confessed Christ before emperors and kingdoms, so the Church continues to confess Him before the world today.
When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.

All Articles

From the very beginning, the community that God was forming was going to be much more inclusive than anyone could have imagined.
Even when the bitter places sink down deep into our bones, the Restorer never relinquishes his grip on you.
Christ’s saving work is finished, but his love is not locked away in the past.
God Meets is the rare cancer book (and as above, I use that term advisedly) that addresses both the judgment God places on human creatures in the Garden (death) and the hard road anyone walks toward that end (100% of us).
What Israel’s story makes painfully obvious is that following the Lord is a lifelong lesson in “I believe, but help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).
On Maundy Thursday, Christ explicitly gave his disciples the new command from which the day takes its name, for the Latin words novum mandatum are the Vulgate’s translation of “new command.”
The reasoning was always the same. The gods were angry. The gods were hungry. The gods required payment.
God wasn’t finished with Israel just yet. The wilderness wasn’t their home.
Your exhaustion may not be a sign of weakness of faith. It may be the fruit of enthusiasm. It is Lent. Fast from your fever. Embrace the exhaustion. Curb your inner enthusiast and cling to Christ.
If the church is going to speak to people weary of religion, it will not be by offering better techniques or louder certainty, but by daring to say what Paul so plainly said: Christ is enough.
Living by faith has never been about what we bring to the table. It has always been, and always will be, about what God does for us when we can’t do anything for ourselves.
We can’t remove our crosses or the reality of our deaths. Only Jesus can.