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.
The confessors at Augsburg remind us that every generation of Christians is called to bear witness to the gospel amid the challenges and pressures of its own age. As they confessed Christ before emperors and kingdoms, so the Church continues to confess Him before the world today.
When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.

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Every age gives cause for both hopefulness and despair.
The accusations of the voices we hear on a daily basis are deafening. There is no shortage of voices that will remind us of our failures.
Not afraid, Jesus decided to take a different mode of transportation across the rough waters—his feet.
We get the exact opposite of what we deserve.
The conversation between four year-old Jackson and his mom in the car after dropping off his siblings at school was all-too-typical.
I walk in the local mall for exercise several times a week. I purposely avoid weekends and hours when the mall is likely to be crowded because, while I am not a racewalker, I do like to keep up a steady pace as opposed to stopping, starting and inching and this is difficult to achieve even when there are few people around.
A confessing church is a church more worried about souls than appearances, family lines, or institutional bottom-lines.
Just when we think we had it all under control, Christ breaks into the midst of our futile efforts to save ourselves.
The idea is that Jesus has called His church to make disciples, and since the church doesn’t look much like the One they are following, the people need to be changed.
What do we do when Christians are more focused on their doing for God than God's doing for them?
How did you become a Christian? This question is frequently asked in many Christian circles. Ask it and you will get one of a thousand different answers, but each will probably start with the same pronoun.
For every child in a mother’s womb, the whole host of heaven and earth, indeed God himself, intercedes.