Wisdom and strength require bootstrap-pulling and the placing of noses to grindstones.
“If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith?

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While I disagree with many things Francis did and believed, I think he deserves credit for this: Francis showed us what Christian leadership can look like.
Every earthly kingdom meets its end. All empires crumble and fall. But from the beginning, the kingdom of God, which Christ would rule, was said to be eternal.
Jesus satisfies, fills, and saves because he is the Son of God, who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns forever.
Longstanding tradition must be bolstered by something outside of ourselves that also lies outside of the traditions of men.
Christ is always the ultimate for God's children, but we sometimes struggle with things that come before.
You have real freedom through the gospel of Jesus Christ, a freedom that doesn’t rest on founders, votes, or power plays.
One Christ rules over all of it. He is the constant, the root that nourishes every estate and every vocation.
No matter how many times we hear this good news, it never stops being good news.
Our faith is precisely where Paul puts it, namely, in the blood of Christ.
What the gospel does is take people who were enemies of God and transform them into lovers of God
The Christian must always remember that personal piety and liturgical uniformity are by no means the marks of true religion.
This is an excerpt from “Confession and Absolution” by John T. Pless in Common Places in Theology: A Curated Collection of Essays from Lutheran Quarterly, edited by Mark Mattes, (1517 Publishing 2023).