God is not a tool in our hands. He does not exist to serve our goals, our metrics, or our platforms.
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03/23/26
The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.
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03/20/26
One great thing about our post-denominational age is that it has opened up opportunities to make common cause with other Lutherans who, despite their differences and eccentricities, can agree on some of the most important things.
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01/30/15
First words may be simple, but they affirm a deep, abiding truth.
01/05/15
I thought I had it all together. I had my life figured out. Even though outwardly I was serving God, inwardly I served only the god named Ego. My heart was the shrine at which I bowed the knee.
01/03/15
That’s what I mean when I say that I’ve struggled with atheism. And still do. The suffering me becomes the questioning me who becomes the doubting me who becoming the unbelieving me.
12/24/14
I know it’s a rite of pious holiday passage to complain about the commercialization of Christmas and to remind everyone to keep the “Christ” in Christmas. And don’t forget the secular “war on Christmas." Whatever.
11/16/14
Ultimately, however, I fell in love with traditions—and specifically, traditional worship—for a single, overarching reason: its components, to varying degrees, are all in the service of the Gospel.
11/06/14
Yet as we mourn, but unlike those who have no hope, so also we repent, but unlike those who have no absolution. For we though we weep, there is a hand that dries all tears.
11/04/14
King has some kind of belief in God, but was probably under no inner compulsion to do anything we would term evangelism.
10/04/14
From creator to priest, our God now moves, from forming animals to slaying them, all so that His Adam and His Eve might remain truly His.
08/26/14
I didn’t know it, in fact I consciously rejected it, but the truth is that throughout those years, both in times of success and failure, God was up to something.
08/05/14
This summer, I made my first trip to Europe since 1984. One of the things I signed up to do was a food tour of the Marais District of Paris. My guide Catherine took us on a circuit through a small area of a neighborhood showing us the best in many food categories.
07/11/14
Because I do care now, and will care even after I’m with the Lord, here are some things I hope and pray are not said at my funeral. I care about those who will be there, about what they will hear.
07/09/14
In an American evangelical landscape that emphasizes the importance of an individual’s personal decision to follow Jesus—as if that were the basis for God’s grace towards a man or woman—Lutherans and Reformed Christians insist that justification before God is based solely on Jesus’ work, two millennia ago.
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