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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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.
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?"
God spoke into the black depth. “Let there be light."
“It’s bigger on the inside” is not only an evocative literary device, it is also a phrase heavy laden with Good News found in the true story of Christianity, especially at Christmas.
God coming to us at Christmas encapsulates the essence of Christian faith: we don't make ourselves strong and then work our way up to a strong God.
He finds the woman and the man in the Garden and fought back for the identity of His people.
Have you ever grown despondent from trying so hard to stop behaving in certain destructive ways, but always failing?
The devil is effective with this attack because it calls out all the things a Christian sinner experiences as simultaneous sinner and saint.
Can the chain of cause and effect extend infinitely?
If the devil took over a church, I suspect it would be bursting at the seams every Sunday, with smiling faces, clean noses, straight morals, conservative voting, institutional fidelity
It was Jesus who appeared to Hagar, comforted her, and gave her the promise of future blessings. It was Jesus who came to her when it seemed everything and everyone else had let her down.
As an avid movie-goer, one of the ways Scripture comes alive for me is to picture the stories as if they were scenes and beats from a live-action movie.