Despite evidences to the contrary, chaos does not reign. Jesus does.
The temptation for many believers is either despair or outrage: despair that Christendom is fading, or outrage at the civilization replacing it.
Do not disregard Luther’s early disputations, but appreciate their specificity and recognize their pastoral and theological continuity with his later works.

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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.
When we preach Jesus crucified for the sin of the world, Jesus crucified to put away God’s harsh judgment, that good news creates faith
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.
In our own lives, we might find that the Law is not an alien word, whether we call it our conscience or our values, our Holy Writ, or our municipality’s laws and regulations
No matter what happens, whether failure, pain, or discouragement, Jesus says, “Come to me... and I will give you rest"
The other day a prominent Evangelical pastor tweeted, “My life’s commitment is to talk about the Bible in such a way that fake Christians feel fake — so that they can be saved.”
The lack of Gospel or abundance of Gospel and Christ’s gifts, more than anything else, determines whether we’ll be overrun by sin, death, and hell
God’s children spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. Imagine the hopelessness. Imagine the frustration.
Pastors are built from the same stuff as everyone else. That’s good, and that’s bad.
I finally climbed all 109 mountains. My journey began out of desperation, fueled by anger, fear, resentment.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works for me, not because it substitutes a temporal and flimsy antidote to my problems but because it points me to the God who has adopted and baptized me
“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.”