If the church is going to speak to people weary of religion, it will not be by offering better techniques or louder certainty, but by daring to say what Paul so plainly said: Christ is enough.
Surveying Scripture, it is an immense comfort to know we’re not alone in our sinfulness.
Christian faith is never a solitary possession. When the congregation confesses, the old speak for the young, the strong for the weak, and the clear-voiced for the trembling.

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When the Bible talks about bearing fruit, it’s not talking about what we must do to produce fruit.
The Gospel restores us to our true humanity, embeds us in the body of Christ, feeds us with Christ’s own body, and offers us a community.
How many of you Christians out there are barely holding it together? I know the inclination should be towards joy and hope, but for some of us, it's not.
It is an ineffable mystery that God suffers, and our preaching must bear out that mystery. One can only emphasize that God is truly man and that God suffers and dies on account of the personal union. But we do not emphasize the suffering apart from the divine nature, or as if the divine nature was not fully His at particular moments. The personal union causes us to deal with the whole Christ.
It’s the following that caught my attention this week. It seems especially appropriate to consider this Sunday, for Holy Week is designed to help Christians follow Jesus through his last and consequential days.
Well it's simple really. I don't pray enough. I don't mean "enough" in the chronological sense like there is actually a right amount of prayer.
The prophets of old were right: we do resemble what we revere. Our anthropology is hijacked by materialism. We become just stuff who consume stuff and hope to have enough stuff to make life worth it.
The texts compel us to deal with the “new thing” (Isa.43:18) that God is doing, namely, preaching the righteousness of faith to all nations. God’s judgment of justification is now for all. It has nothing to do with the flesh and everything to do with faith.
What he says in this parable has significance for us today, and needs to be preached. But the application is not direct and therefore should be done carefully.
Where contrition is evident, the conscience has already been prodded, piqued, finally terrified. More Law only serves to confirm the lie this person is already at risk of believing: that the last work of the conscience is also God’s last word. But God’s last word is the word of absolution, not the confirmation of the conscience’s testimony, but now its contradiction.
When we're under stress, when we're weighed down by responsibilities, and when we feel like nobody cares and no one can help us, we run to God.
One of my jobs in high school was helping local ranchers work cattle. We’d vaccinate, cut off horns, castrate, mark their ears, and brand them.