We are invited to entrust everything to the one who accomplished what we could not: living and bleeding and dying and rising again, so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). To put it another way, when it comes to the kingdom of God, there’s no room for DIY’ers. Best leave it to the professionals.
We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
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.

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His love for you is so deep that in his mercy, while you were yet a sinner, God sent his only begotten Son to die for you.
“So loved,” then isn’t about how much but instead simply how.
We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
Rightly distinguishing between law and gospel, as Paul helps us see in 2 Corinthians 3, is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
Even as he was dying, the heart of God poured itself out for the sake of sinners.
The gospel's message is the scandalous announcement that Yahweh has stooped to our frame, to where we are.
Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.
The law had to have its way with the expert to bring him around (and back) to Abraham's response.
The nefarious thing about idolatry is that just about anything can become your idol: career, family, fame, wealth, status, spouse, you name it, any good thing can become a ‘god-thing” with ease. 
Maybe, just maybe, our goal for 2023 should not be to live more but to die more.
In Memory of My Friend, James Arne Nestingen
To trust in the Lord, the Messiah, the Deliverer, is our salvation and our only hope. Yet he does not trust us to have this “trust” on our own or of our own will.