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.
We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
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.

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This week, we’ll take a closer look at what it means to have a God who remembers us. Today, 1517 Scholar in Residence Chad Bird first introduces the Old Testament meaning behind the word and the Hebrew way of remembering.
The issue is not the existence of so-called inner rings, but our desire and willingness to spend our lives in order to gain from an inner ring what is freely promised in Christ: hope, security, and identity.
God comes to us through the flesh and blood and spirit of Christ precisely where he promised to be manifest to us and for us.
Only the resurrection of Jesus guarantees and facilitates divine presence and love to us as divine life for us.
We may not all be mass-murdering Nazis. But we all have the same root sin that causes the most egregious criminal activity on the face of the earth. We all have the desire to be our own God.
God’s published will offers us anchorage, the anchorage of Jesus Christ, in the midst of chaos, reminding us that there is a greater purpose to our lives than the pursuit of worldly success or fleeting pleasures.
This is an excerpt from part two of “Finding God in the Darkness: Hopeful Reflections from the Pits of Depression, Despair, and Disappointment” by Bradley Gray (1517 Publishing, 2023).
If Jesus did not rise, then religion is just religion — a mere anthropological phenomenon.
While we wait in tribulation for our white robes (or pants) to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, we confess to one another our seen and unseen stains.
The resurrection of Jesus encompasses the total and comprehensive glorification of a human being, not merely his restoration.
The Bible not only calls us to remember God’s past acts of deliverance; it also invites us to recognize that God in Christ is still in the business of delivering sinners from bondage.
Caesar boasted: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” Christ can rightly say: “I came. I saved. I ascended.”