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 has placed preachers of His Word in the frontlines of His combat against Satan and all his minions that is fought out on the battlefields of the individual lives of believers.
Our first mistake in thinking about the blessed life is we expect to experience it fully in this life.
This passage, above all others, speaks most fully about Jesus as the elder brother, the firstborn, of a large family; the family of God the Father, Creator of humankind.
A close examination of the entire life and ministry of Jesus reflects the Exodus event, and Jesus is the New Moses/the prophet like Moses.
The following is an excerpt from "Finding Christ in the Straw" written by Robert M. Hiller (1517 Publishing, 2020).
Even when God doesn’t take away the troubled waters of our life, he is the Bridge we can lean on no matter what storms may come our way.
The following is an excerpt from “A Year of Grace: Collected Sermons of Advent through Pentecost” written by Bo Giertz and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2019).
We sing, and in so doing, we are blessed as we are instilled with the word of God in word and song.
Jonathan saw in David a reflection of who he himself was. This recognition pulled him outside himself and bound him to another.
Above all, pastors must aim their preaching at the people God has placed in the care of the pastor rather than airing pious ideas that did not speak to their situations.
We preach, teach and confess the virgin birth, and rightly so, but the actual sign is not the Virgin giving birth, it is the Child who is born.
The Church becomes anti-church when the new world order Christ inaugurated by eliminating demographic division through the commonality of Baptism is exploded by allegiance to cults of personality.