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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The table is full-laden; feast ye all sumptuously. The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away.
The story did not end with Jesus' death and resurrection, or even with the Acts of the Apostles.
The preacher does not merely send out the raven. From the pulpit flies forth the dove of the Gospel.
I grew up with a great deal of guilt. It still keeps me up at night. For one reason or another, I was convinced I hadn’t done enough to be loved by God.
Hers is not a beauty of breathtaking cathedrals, stained glass, or towering arches, but of a body.
It is the strangest of morgues—people arrive dead as doornails and leave alive.
Old Testament narratives foreshadowed the gifts that our Father gives us in baptism.
The arrangement was made with Abraham when God claimed for Himself all of his being, and put the seal of His promise upon the most personal member of his anatomy.
Can one still find a church that teaches that Christianity, and the Christian life, can be summed up as: "We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone?"
In his Gospel account, Luke challenges us to play "Where is Jesus?"
The devil is effective with this attack because it calls out all the things a Christian sinner experiences as simultaneous sinner and saint.
Sometimes we try be the bad god, sometimes the good god, oftentimes a freaky hybrid of both. The result is the same: Jesus the savior just gets in our way.