You are a soul. Not an algorithm. Not a hashtag. A soul knit together by a God who does not mock, does not abandon, and does not lie.
What I was missing—what so many are missing—is a Church that doesn’t just speak about Christ, but delivers him.
Though several generations removed from Luther’s generation, Francke came of age right on time for a new wave of spirituality to collide with the Reformation in the movement known as Pietism.

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There is an unfortunate, but familiar pilgrimage that entirely too many have taken—servants who have offered strong confession and service in the pure Gospel, but who then have doctrinally gone astray.
In this evil generation we’re all in the dark about something. We’re all inevitably overcome by the darkness of sin and death.
If you want to find God, he’s hiding in plain sight. Christ is in the very things that we would never select as a vessel befitting divinity.
We spend the first nine months of our lives in utter darkness. There are no tiny fluorescent bulbs beaming from the ceiling of the womb, no fetal flashlights, not even a pinprick of illumination.
For many, there are days when they’re as excited about going to work on Sunday morning as you are about going to work on Monday morning.
The term Gospel came to mean a new kind of proclamation so that the Law and the new doctrine [Gospel] are distinguished in such a way that the new doctrine gains primary influence.
Really, once you’ve heard and believed the Gospel, the goal now is to learn more and more about the law of God, so that you can mature into a commandment-keeping, law-loving, obedient disciple of Jesus. Right?
Christ alone has finished your salvation. Christ alone could and has made satisfaction for your sins.
What is really good for the soul is not so much confession as absolution. If confession is us telling the truth about ourselves to God, then absolution is God telling us a truer truth about ourselves.
Believe in God, belong to a church, and behave yourself isn’t the Gospel.
So what's the back side? What's the promise? We shall not have other gods, but we do have the one, true God—the promise of a God for us.
During my many journeys to Japan, I discovered that more than a quarter millennium after his death Bach is now playing a key role in evangelizing that country, one of the most secularized nations in the developed world.