American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
The Passover wasn’t just Israel’s story; it’s ours.
God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.

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This Jesus healed the blind and the lame and the mute and the barren and raised the dead.
If we get past Sunday School moralizing what do we discover in the Old Testament?
When it comes to this world, our beds are most often a mess even when we do our best to make them in the morning.
There in that moment, the waters of baptism reached down deep into the forsaken path of the grave with a man whose body and mind could no longer hold onto any reality otherwise.
I don’t know about you, but I am perpetually of the mind that God is disappointed in me.
Some lie and tell us that to sin is to be ourselves. But it is not. Sin is not natural to humanity.
For most of my Christian experience I was taught and I taught others that church was primarily a place to go to serve, to use your gifts, to bless others.
The little psychologist within us is often hard at work to pinpoint the origin of life’s problems.
Following him will also mean keeping our eyes locked on him so unswervingly that we don’t have the time or energy to be standing on tiptoes, peeping over fences into other people’s troubles and struggles.
God’s Law is a death sentence for us sinners. There is no winning beneath the Law of God.
The Gospel predominates when hearers receive the saving gifts of Christ as God’s final word to them.
In Martin Luther's Small Catechism he borrows a line from St. Augustine about what defines a "god."