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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God chose Russell Brand, chose to defy his fast-escaping life and drink up all his swift-running sin in the River Thames.
Five promises were seemingly all those apostles, staring into the sky, had to go on. Five promises that were more than enough.
This article is written by guest contributor, Christopher J. Richmann.
The price was really paid. Your sin remains buried in Christ’s tomb.
When Jesus appeared again to his disciples on that first Easter evening and again a week later with Thomas and the Emmaus disciples, what did Jesus show them? His hands.
Like the serpent on the pole, God still puts real-life things up for us to look to for salvation.
Bathed in the waters of baptism, you are placed in God's path of totality, a path he won for each and every one of us.
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.
The seemingly small, the particular, the previously overlooked, magnifies in importance.
This day and its meaning provided the opportunity for an anonymous author to write a poem for Sheer Thursday about Judas' betrayal of Jesus.
He represents our likeness, fulfills it, and so has the prerogative to reproduce his likeness in us.
We can interpret "be the Church" as either law or gospel.