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.

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The same words of hope and peace that were entrusted to Israel are available to all, to “everyone who believes” (Acts 10:43).
No one is harder to convert than a religious expert.
The temptation for many believers is either despair or outrage: despair that Christendom is fading, or outrage at the civilization replacing it.
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.
Christ’s saving work is finished, but his love is not locked away in the past.
Job needs a savior, and he knows it. And in Jesus, he gets one.
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.”
Lent exists because we are forgetful creatures. We forget how hungry we really are.
God is not a tool in our hands. He does not exist to serve our goals, our metrics, or our platforms.
The Church’s unity is not uniformity in every matter of her well-being. It is faithfulness in what constitutes her being.
When we despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.