The word of assurance given to Moses at Sinai echoes through eternity on the lips of the Savior, untroubling troubled souls with the good news that there is one who walks the paths of life with you, and soon he’s coming to bring you to himself.
The greatest obstacle to friendship in middle age isn't that nobody wants friends. It's that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. But here's the good news: Christ has already gone first for you. And because He has, you are free to go first for someone else.
Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything under heaven. But God has also placed eternity in our hearts, and that makes us strange creatures: able to rejoice in this life yet always aching for a life that only Christ can give.

All Articles

I don’t think the people of Jerusalem designed to reject God. They didn’t wake up one day and decide that, instead of listening to God, they would make it their mission to kill him. They were deceived. Blinded. Deluded by sin and its author. As a result, they were unable and unwilling to hear the Word of the Lord.
“There is no obedience that does not have its eyes on either God or neighbor. An obedience that is motivated by what we will get out of it is no obedience at all.”
Our church doesn’t talk a lot about giving up things for Lent. Lent seasons means we have Sunday night services as well, where we bring in speakers who talk about a different theme each year.
The word of faith means the word that declares us righteous and gives us Christ’s own righteousness as a gift. At the start of the Passion Season, these texts call us deny ourselves and our pride that comes by our obedience to the Law, and to cast all of our sins, failures, and weaknesses onto Christ, to trust Him alone for our salvation.
There are two ways to think about what’s happening when someone is tempted. The first is to imagine temptation as enticement toward something bad and wrong. This is probably the more common of the two. But there’s another way of thinking about it. Temptation could also be seen as encouragement away from something good and right.
First, if this passage from Hebrews 3 shines any further light on the Transfiguration account (Luke 9 is already quite bright!), it’s that on the mountain Jesus is showing us where following Him leads to in the end. No wonder Peter wanted to stay.
You’re not normally an eaves-dropper, and you don’t make it a habit of sticking your nose in other people’s business. But some conversations beg to be overheard. Transfiguration is like that.
The following is an excerpt from Law and Gospel in Action written by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2019).
Did the Apostle Paul just say that “he fills up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ?" That seems a little at odds with Jesus’ statement, "It is finished."
Christ and the Evangelists, along with saints Peter and Paul, show a deep attachment to the Book of Psalms...it was because the Psalms were about the Messiah, the Christ of God.
The resurrection of Christ is not God’s way of loving the last enemy (15:26). He despises it; defeats it. He makes such a mockery of it that it loses its name among Christians. Death is dead and can no longer be called death, but merely sleep, just a sweet and momentary sleep until the living Christ’s parousia (v. 23).
This week Jesus continues by discussing the behavior of his people. He’s particularly interested in the way his people treat others—especially those who mistreat them. Like last week, the only way to describe it is backwards.