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 reason the mind is endlessly troubled about God predestining everything is the vague generalization. Generalizations are cold as ice, without the warm Christ.
The Psalms aren’t the clandestine successes of a faithful soul, but are the journaled hopes of a desperate soul — of one teetering on the edge of oblivion.
Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.
We do not have to endure the pain and suffering of this fallen existence forever, just for a little while.
The acquisition of salvation, the giving of salvation, and the keeping of salvation are entirely dependent upon the Savior himself.
The one true God has revealed himself as the answer to the longings of every human heart. The search has ended. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Holy, Holy, Holy.
If you and I were to examine our own lives, we’d likely have to admit that we are frequent disciples of Jeroboam’s “bootleg religion.”
God bestows faith that it should deal not with ordinary things, but with things no human being can master such as death, sin, the world, and Satan.
The Holy Spirit is sent, not to talk about himself, but to point us to Jesus.
The world’s history and Jewish history was like a story in search of an ending; and when Jesus rose from the dead the ending was now revealed.
Faith isn’t something that needs to be done. It’s something to be enjoyed because faith is a gift bestowed by God’s word through the hearing of the Gospel.
For those of us who recognize the disciples’ despair in ourselves, Jesus comes with the same word: “Relax, it’s me. Peace be with you.”