God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.
But while scholars are right to focus on the bond between Martin and Hans, the evidence of Martin’s own words suggests their relationship may not have been as troubled as some suppose. For Hans Luther was not a cartoon villain but a normal human being attempting to make his way in the world and raise his children to the best of his ability.
Jesus offers something infinitely better. He tells us to put down our gavel—not because sin isn't real, but because the only Judge who has the right to condemn is the very One who was condemned for us.

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I finally watched the film “Encanto” with my kids. I had heard many people say the subtext of this movie was deeper than most. So, we snuggled up on the couch and watched it to see what everyone was talking about.
If God ever forgives you, it is not just allowing you to start over and try harder the second time, but it is a whole, new, complete justification that is given as a free gift and without any work of our own—outside the law.
The language of faith speaks promise and persecution, hope and trial, victory and pain. The language of the world may well speak the former, but rarely the latter.
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.
You might not know it, but every Christian hopes for the day when their faith will die. Really. I promise. Faith’s death is our celebration.
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 children are not our own, but even more, our children are born in need. They are sinful, from conception and from birth.
At its heart, this is what Deacon King Kong is all about: the paradox of Jesus carving his victory out of the last thing we expect, not our triumphs but our defeats.
You are not in debt to sin. You don’t owe it anything. There’s no reason for you to serve it.