We are invited to entrust everything to the one who accomplished what we could not: living and bleeding and dying and rising again, so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). To put it another way, when it comes to the kingdom of God, there’s no room for DIY’ers. Best leave it to the professionals.
We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
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.

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Mere confrontation in the form of, “What you’re doing is wrong—you need to change yourself,” can never solve the root of our problem.
Jesus is still in the business of dividing. He has come to divide us from our sinful thoughts and habits. He has come to divide us from false views of the world and distortions of His Word.
Overcrowding on Mount Everest betrays what our culture worships. We bow down at the altar of the impossible to be seen as the conquerors, the champions.
Preaching is simply the verbal bestowal of what Scripture has already given us in written form
The Father knows our needs because he knows everything. This is a comforting thought, but only if He is gracious.
Martin Luther is not–or, at least should not–be the object of our affection.
The gelded Gospel is shiny and attractive and compelling, and we can perform the procedure in any number of ways.
These new texts and manuscripts, while not altering the message of the text, can give us better insight into particular historical and grammatical issues.
The real problem with the way we talk about Baptism in particular, and the sacraments at all, is that we are simply afraid of letting God’s Word get us.
Indeed, baptism is life because resurrection is life. Nothing short of regeneration—renewal of life—is accomplished by God through sheer grace because of Christ Jesus.
Jesus names what life does not consist of, and in doing so he gets to something near and dear to our hearts as Americans—our possessions.
These treasures show us that, no matter how well we think we know this poem, there’s always more layers to uncover.