“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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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.
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.
May we, as preachers, rise and proclaim that Jesus Christ is sufficient for all our spiritual hunger.
Pride builds identities that leave no room for grace.
We believe in a Savior who raises the dead: this is why the church is the one place on earth that can speak plainly about abortion without collapsing into despair.
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
The crisis is not merely that people are leaving. The crisis is that we have relinquished what is uniquely Lutheran and deeply needed.
Merry Christmas, Christ has spoken, and his verdict stands.
This story points us from our unlikely heroes to the even more unlikely, and joyous, good news that Jesus’ birth for us was just as unlikely and unexpected.
Illness is not romantic. It is not a test, a metaphor, nor a blessing in disguise.
“The well that washes what it shows” captures the essence of Linebaugh’s project, which aims to give the paradigmatic law-gospel hermeneutic a colloquial and visual language.