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.
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.

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But I can’t evade the question. And neither can you. Because every day God puts it to us. We don’t hear his voice, but nevertheless his voice echoes within us. Asking, prying, confronting us: What do you want me to do for you?
The more I seek God on my own terms, the deeper I am gazing at my own navel.
God acts through His Word and means in order to create, restore, and renew inward faith.
Galatians 5 isn’t a move beyond Christ to the Christian life. Galatians 5 is the Christian life in Christ.
Thank God for heroes: they inspire us to be better, to help others, to live and work for the good of our race. And thank God for villains, too: they incarnate our shadow side, our nocturnal soul, the dragon within us that must incessantly have its throat slit on the altar of repentance.
It’s been my experience that All Saints’ Day, celebrated on November 1st and observed on the first Sunday following, gets overshadowed by the celebration of Reformation Day.
On this day, the church remembers all the saints who have gone before us.
The striking truth of this festival is not that the church remembers the saints who have gone before us, even though we rightly chime the bells and speak the names of those who in the past year have flown away (Ps. 90:10). The real joy of this day is that those who have departed are counted together with us as the church and we are counted together with them.
Rather than calling me to pick burrs off my coat, God’s love strips me of my delusions and cuts to the heart of my disease.
The Feast of the Reformation affords preachers a special opportunity to catechize on the doctrine of justification by faith. It is also a perfect week for us to read through Romans in full for our devotions. It is an opportunity to hear again those marvelous words of absolution and sins forgiven and to recognize a righteousness which is revealed apart from the Law (Rom. 3:21); our need for absolution must be very great.
So, in keeping with Mark’s focus on discipleship this Fall, your Reformation Sunday sermon on John 8 might reflect on what it means to be a disciple. As you proclaim the commands and promises of Christ, you might invite your hearers not only to believe his Word, but also to abide in it. To hear and mediate on his promises in the various ways he delivers them.
What postmoderns see in modernism is a misuse of power through the control of dominant narratives.