The temptation for many believers is either despair or outrage: despair that Christendom is fading, or outrage at the civilization replacing it.
Through baptism, absolution, and the Lord’s Supper, Christ meets you with his radical forgiveness which changes everything, even the self!
Do not disregard Luther’s early disputations, but appreciate their specificity and recognize their pastoral and theological continuity with his later works.

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There is hope and healing for you in Jesus Christ, the God who immersed Himself so deeply in our sufferings that He, too, wept over the death of a dear friend.
My life will be unwritten, erased by the hand of mortality. And fool that I am, I stand here threatening to snuff out the life of a woman caught in the act which I have acted out in my heart with a thousand women.
“Now, a certain man was sick...” Rick was kind. He knew my name before I knew his. The few times we talked, I felt like I should get to know this guy. I had actually planned to strike up a conversation the next time I saw him at church.
The entire life of believers is one of repentance.
I’ve come to realize at the tender age of 47 that sometimes church doesn’t work.
We have violated not that of which we are ignorant, but that of which we are fully aware. If you want proof, simply look at how well we attempt to cover up our evil deeds.
For it is His law I have broken, His office in which I have failed, His people against whom I have sinned. All is from Him, so all I have taken, I have taken from Him. All others against whom I have sinned, I have sinned because they are of Him.
I was angry at heaven, at earth, and everything in between, for my life and my love and my hopes had all gone wrong, terribly, irreversibly, wrong.
So the law was shattered, our icon was becoming urine and dung inside our guts, and lots of bloody corpses littered our camp. All this because we decided that it was okay for us to choose how we approach God.
The wine of communion is a gift from God and the blood of Christ we receive at the rail an inebriant that encourages and frees us.
Which makes the question of prudence worth asking again: given the recent and strong Catholic attempts to defend a broad religious liberty, why all the implicit and explicit swipes at their potential Protestant allies?
In Sunday morning Bible study, our class is reading 1st Peter. This week was chapter 3 and I’ve always had a challenge with the imagery there. I’m talking about the way Peter brings Noah into the picture and connects it to Christian suffering.