The Reformers did not return to the sources because they believed the old was better than the new, nor because antiquity possesses authority simply by virtue of its age. They returned to the sources to recover the language and words that were actually written and spoken, especially those by great teachers and, most importantly, God Himself.
The certainty of faith is utter assurance because it depends upon nothing of your own. It is entirely trusting that God is a propitious, pardoning God—the God who justifies sinners by forgiving them.
Sinners get faith as a gift when Christ takes their captivity captive.

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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.
We have to trust that there is value in these conversations. They are not valuable only when they can be counted as a program. And what are most programs but attempts to get us to “act like” Christians at some future point of time?
Have we made Christianity too easy? No, God has made Christianity “too easy” because He has made it pure gift.
To determine whether the conception of Christianity as philosophy might actually be warranted, attention must be given to the actual natures of philosophy and religion, especially as then understood.
It was happening again. I sat across from my dear friend at one of our favorite restaurants. We were finishing our glass of wine and eating the end of the sushi when the waitress approached.
Every year, when this day rolls around, I turn over the stones of remembrance that litter my mind, to see what lurks beneath.
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.
I’ve come to realize at the tender age of 47 that sometimes church doesn’t work.
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.
What does Steve Jobs have to do with Theology? Very little. But that won’t stop me from trying to make a connection.
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.
I am lord of all I eat. I lord it over meat, potatoes, pecan pie. I make those foods serve my body, transforming them into me. But it is not so with the meal of Jesus.