Luther neither removed the Apocrypha from the Bible nor discouraged its use. Rather, he received and preserved the ancient distinction inherited from the fathers: the Apocrypha is valuable, edifying, and worthy of reading, but it is not Holy Scripture and therefore cannot serve as the foundation of Christian doctrine.
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.

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Erasmus and the Unintended Reformation
This is an excerpt from chapter 2 of The Resurrection Fact: Responding to Modern Critics, edited by John Bombaro and Adam Francisco (1517 Publishing 2016).
If your faith is rooted in the gospel of Zion, in the good news of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection on your behalf, you are already a member of the “heavenly Jerusalem”
This is a companion article to “Johann Spangenberg on Dying Well”
Success is emphatically not your primary identity.
Strasbourg’s hymnals are especially relevant to American Lutherans because much of what we experience in our churches comes to us from Strasbourg.
If you are a Christian, you already have what you need to give a reason for the hope within you. That reason, though, is not you.
Now that the Lord of Sabaoth has involved himself, something ends, something is born.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these early Lutheran hymns – and their physical availability in hymnals – in the piety of common people living in Lutheran towns and territories.
The Battle of Frankenhausen stands as a warning for what can happen when we abandon the Word God has given us and chase after some vision of our own imaginations.
The gospel is for sinners – both the tax collector and Pharisee, both in need of the Great Physician.
God chose Russell Brand, chose to defy his fast-escaping life and drink up all his swift-running sin in the River Thames.