This is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of Fear Not: How the Gospel Disrupts Our Deepest Anxieties by Luke Kjolhaug (1517 Publishing, 2026).
We draw near because Christ our Mediator has gone where we never could, and he has brought us with him.
The Israelite God was different from all the other gods, thus, the worship of Yahweh differed from that of all other gods.

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Perhaps a phone number seems an odd thing to get sentimental about, but I can’t help myself. You see, if that number, and the phone connected to it, could speak, they would tell my life’s story.
In the pageant of Easter Week, Maundy Thursday speaks about the last time Jesus ate with his Disciples and how He washed their feet in preparation for participating in the Passover meal (John 13).
What we confess concerning a corpse confesses much about how deep, or how shallow, is our understanding of the importance of the incarnation of Jesus, his death, and his (as well as our own) resurrection.
In this particular church, all sins are forgiven, but some sins are more forgiven than others.
Of all the words this woman ever spoke, these alone are chiseled forever into the stone of holy writ, and into the church’s memory. Mrs. Job becomes the patron saint of quick-tongued women.
One day I walked about that place I had tried to make home. I realized it was a prison cell of my own devising.
Why does John make you uncomfortable? You know. It’s not just the clothing; it’s not only the hair; it’s not even really the diet. John the Baptist is uncivilized—that’s the problem.
Though the theophanic elements at the Jerusalem Pentecost were not as diverse as those at Sinai, there is one prominent commonality between the two: divine speech out of divine fire.
This is the night when the earth is formless and void; and the darkness of blood is over the face of Thy Son. And the Spirit of God moves out of His body as He gives up the Ghost.
The prophets had foretold, His coming Incarnation; The Word would make our flesh, His only habitation.
People take off their public masks when around relatives. They let their darkness shine. That’s why Manuel spends his December 25 in the graveyard, talking to the dead.
Perhaps part of the mistake we’ve made is in forgetting that the first Christmas, the actual birthday of Jesus, started out as the worst of times.