We don’t flinch at sin. We speak Christ into it.
One might say that the first statement of the Reformation was that a saint never stops repenting.
Wisdom and strength require bootstrap-pulling and the placing of noses to grindstones.

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God doesn’t permit me to write you off regardless of who you are or what you may have done. Nor does he allow you to dismiss me because I might not fit your image of a vessel of God’s mercy.
In the middle of the spring, on a run-of-the-mill Thursday, the ascension interrupts the mundane to herald the extraordinary: Christ is in charge and is present on earth as he is in heaven, guiding history for the sake of his church.
We all live with the knowledge of good and evil, but lack the power or ability to affect either one. We can judge good and evil but we cannot control them.
When Christians die, heaven does not “get another angel.” We cannot become angels any more than we can become giraffes or ocean waves or stars. We are people and will remain so after this present life. God did not make a mistake when he made us human.
So let’s go to dark Gethsemane. For there we see that even in his greatest moment of weakness, Jesus is our only source of strength. He drinks the cup of wrath so we can drink the cup of grace.
The throne of grace is always available to us. For the Christian, it isn’t and never will be a throne of judgment. All of the judgment for all of our sin was laid upon our perfect Savior.
Look to the crucifix. There you see God as God is, in Himself. You see God in action for you.
Luke presents Mary to us as a model of Christian faith and discipleship. On this Festival of the Annunciation, I invite you to consider this view of the Virgin Mary for your own life of devotion and faith in Christ.
When Luther's barber, Peter Beskendorf, asked him how to pray, Luther wrote him an open letter that has become a classic expression of the "when, how, and what" of prayer. It is as instructive today as when it was first penned it in 1535.
When we pray, “Thy will be done,” we are praying a cosmic, grand and mighty prayer.
Though not without his faults, Anselm of Canterbury is unquestionably one of the great theologians of the last millennium.