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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We cannot scan any random passage of Scripture and automatically assume the words are unconditionally addressed to us. Often, very often, they are not.
The season of Lent gives almost unparalleled opportunity for preachers to placard before their auditors the Cross of Christ and beckon Christians to take up their cross and follow Him.
Since the law is our mother-tongue, we naturally assume it’s the only language that exists; this ceaseless, damning voice reminding us that we are not all that we should be.
God is not what we experience him to be, what our emotions narrate him to be, or what our intuition thinks he might be. God is what and who he says he is.
Bonhoeffer was in the unenviable position of trying to break a spell. The spell was the Nazi crisis, where the totalitarian state threatened the church, and yet to many, seemed to be saving the culture and nation from mortal dangers.
Our anxiety about the future is a consequence of our old self’s attempts to achieve freedom for himself apart from Christ Jesus.
Trusting in Christ’s promise of new life and deliverance pours the ability to abandon fixing our eyes only inwardly and lets us see ourselves as others see us.
When God cancels you, it is an occasion for all of the canceled who are in heaven and earth to rejoice in that one more is added to our number.
Has the modern world taken too strong a dose of the gospel as its inheritance from the Reformation?
Want to do yourself, your family, your friends, and the world a good deed? Hold on loosely to your politics. Don’t drop it. Don’t toss it aside. Don’t privatize it. But, above all, don’t hold on to your politics as if your life, your soul, and your salvation depend on it.
Paul knew, and so do we: the law doesn’t change hearts or heal the world. More demands won’t do the trick.
God makes all things new. He refashions us from those turned in upon ourselves, turned to idols of our own choice and making, to experience the freedom He gives by pronouncing us His righteous children.