There are important historical reasons for making a distinction between ministry and vocation.
It appeared everything would work out perfectly when Ivan the Great married Sophia Palaiologos. But when inheritance was discussed the problems arrived.
When the enemies of your faith surround you, don’t look to your own wits and wisdom.

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Although God is always closer to us than the nose on our face, he has not taken the wraps off and given any sinful and mortal human being a full-measure, face-to-face meeting.
Everyone is living as a naked sufferer who’s been duped into believing that the nakedness of suffering has to be covered up.
In Christ, we live beneath an open heaven having the definitive proof in the cross of Christ that God is outrageously for us, not against us.
Good Friday encompasses the silence of God, even as it focuses on our salvation in the cross of Christ.
Each day gives us occasion to die to our sinful identities of all kinds and to live out a life in Christ’s footsteps as children of God.
Golgotha is the point where not only Mary and John’s family life assumed a new character, but it is the point of orientation for all human community that uses the cross to straighten out the lives of individuals turned in upon themselves.
The cross does not remain on a hill far away. It pursues us into the valleys, the ravines, the crevices in which we get trapped as we wander in search of a fixed point for our lives.
Paul wants us to see this “present evil age” is dominated by a theology of glory and “the age to come” is dominated by a theology of the cross. They are two ways of understanding and interpreting all of reality, but especially the ways and nature of God.
Christianity is not about principally about ethics. It was the Cross on the Hill rather than the Sermon on the Mount that produced the impact of Christianity upon the world.
When we stop looking to Christ in faith, we are walking in sin. Anything (including our supposed law-keeping) that does not proceed from faith is sin.
The Bible is a book for the desperate. That is its target audience. Recognizing our desperation readies us to hear the consolation that only God’s Word can offer.
And because Jesus on the cross was sin in its entirety, God cannot look at him. He turns his face away, causing Jesus to cry out in utmost agony, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”