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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Whether one believes Jesus to be God or not, His words and actions proclaim that He did not come to be served but to serve.
Don’t let anyone tell you the academy denies the concept of truth...good gracious, I hope by the end of the semester they are still alive.
I’m still laughing now as hard as I laughed back then. And the salve that he gave me in that moment still works some strange magic on me to this day.
One of my favorite shows in recent memory is the American law enforcement drama Law & Order.
Though they have never left the church, they have been lost all the while.
When I first began to hear that the Bible’s good news was a whole lot less about me and a whole lot more about Christ, I just didn’t get it.
One of the common things I see my congregants struggle with is the concept of forgiveness. Contrary to what I had assumed would be the case, I find congregants don’t struggle so much with giving forgiveness as they do living with forgiveness.
On a recurring basis, Christians spot news headlines that signal yet one more moral collapse in society, the growing paganization of the cultures in which we live, the spread of antipathy toward the faith.
Who should we baptize and when? How old does the person have to be? What if we get it wrong? Will something terrible happen to us?
The God who calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves will seem hopelessly out of touch with your insulated life of self-sufficiency.
Today, people often bemoan the loss of children in the church.
We have now reached a point where many believe so strongly in individualism that nothing else matters.