God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.
Salvation is not merely to be put in “safety” but to be put into Christ.
Bringing your family to church to receive “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) in Word and Sacrament honors and pleases God.

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Luther recognized that in the penitential psalms, God gives us the words to cry out to Him in our distress, lament our sins, and confess trust in the promise of His righteousness in which alone is our sure and certain hope.
For Luther, those who refuse Christ as a curse want their sin removed not in Christ but in themselves.
God is mercy. He was mercy then. He’s mercy now. God showed them His glory, if only a reflection, in the face of Moses.
This is the patient love of God. He is stubborn about the salvation of sinners. He will not be rushed even if his name is mocked, and the trustworthiness of his promises are called into question.
Excerpt #3 from the new book “Withertongue Emails" by Donavon Riley.
The firestorm of the Reformation which turned Europe upside-down was not Luther’s doing. It was the Word, and the Spirit working through it.
Excerpt #2 from the new book “Withertongue Emails" by Donavon Riley.
The problem with sin is that we fail to honor God who wants to take our hearts captive and fill us with his goodness.
Excerpt #1 from the new book “Withertongue Emails" by Donavon Riley.
Because Jesus has set us free, we enjoy a freedom of movement in His world, under His grace, that loosens our tongues to sing His praise.
The world we inhabit is wrong in so many ways, and a holistic approach to this “wrongness” traces its cause both to sin itself and to the effects of sin.
Justification and regeneration are, therefore, necessarily connected and have profound implications upon the craft of preaching.