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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The problem with sin is that we fail to honor God who wants to take our hearts captive and fill us with his goodness.
God’s design in the Law is to enable man to know himself; to perceive the false and unjustified state of his heart; to discover how far he is from God and to disdain his own goodness.
Because Jesus has set us free, we enjoy a freedom of movement in His world, under His grace, that loosens our tongues to sing His praise.
The world we inhabit is wrong in so many ways, and a holistic approach to this “wrongness” traces its cause both to sin itself and to the effects of sin.
Aquinas would craft a systematic theology that did with the matter of faith what Aristotle had done with the natural world.
Justification and regeneration are, therefore, necessarily connected and have profound implications upon the craft of preaching.
Grace remits sin, and peace quiets the conscience. Sin and conscience torment us, but Christ has overcome these fiends now and forever.
Our only claim to fame is that we have been claimed by a God who is consistently drawn to losers!
Christ is present in the pure preaching of the gospel. And if Christ is present, then we have entered into the domain of the sacraments.
Christ has received the mark of law that we might be marked with the gospel, with the sign of his holy cross on our heads and hearts as redeemed children of God.
Moses was sent to keep the house in order, but this Child is sent to bring the house home, and you are part of that house, the household of God.
Getting ready for Christ’s coming is a practice in humility.