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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The Holy Spirit unleashes his power through us, his vines, and we then get to watch as his fruits blossom and ripen.
It’s not our eloquence or persuasive rhetoric that changes hearts, but the Word of God that pierces through the hardened shells of unbelief and breathes life into the dead bones of sinners.
This is an excerpt from chapter 9 of “What Can Really Know?: The Strengths and Limits of Human Understanding” by David Andersen (1517 Publishing, 2023).
No matter how far away they wander, God always hears the prayers of his children.
Prayer is not just about asking for things. It's about receiving what has already been given to us in Christ.
Only by accurately and honestly reporting the views of those with whom we disagree can we then properly address and refute them. This is the approach Solberg has taken.
The hardest thing you and I will ever be called to do is to believe that it is done already, that it really and truly is finished.
A Christian is a man who desires to enter heaven not through his own goodness and works, but through the righteousness and works of Christ.
I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.
The further up and further into the season of Epiphany we get, the bigger the grace of God in Christ is, the brighter the Light of Christ shines, and the more blessed we are in Jesus' epiphany for us.
All of Scripture, every last syllable of it, is meant to drive us to "consider Jesus," the One who comes to "make us right" by gifting us his righteousness.
Jesus not only healed her daughter, but he also gave himself to her. Wherever she went from then on, he was with her.