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Urchin at War is now available from 1517 Publishing
The following is an adaptation from "Law and Gospel in Action" written by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2019).
Christ crucified is at the heart of both our freedom from sin and death and our freedom to serve and love our neighbor.
It is important to see how the LORD does NOT answer the questions Job and his friends have been wrestling with.
Your prayers are not what make you acceptable in his sight. You have already been made acceptable through the blood of Christ.
But this is not a story of Jesus being taken many places. This is a story of Jesus remaining in one place and deepening in His love of the Spirit and the Father.
Instead of defining the true church in the way of the law, Augustine approaches the issue pastorally in the way of the gospel.
For Luther, Jesus does something much better for those who grieve than simply identify with them: He brings suffering and evil to an end in His own death.
The devil isn’t a popular subject nowadays. The argument is made that we’ve progressed as a culture.
The Law gets a bad rap. There is certainly a negative component to the Law. The work of the Law is very different than the work of the Gospel.
We focus on what we have, what we don't have, and how and when God is going to give us what we need. This the opposite of faith.
The reason is much simpler than that: to learn to pray, you must first die. The language of prayer is taught in the school of death.