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 Lord knew how it felt to be a rejected stone.
Walther’s living legacy is his enduring teaching on how to distinguish the law and the gospel in the Church’s proclamation.
Sunday morning is about receiving, not giving.
The only way to change the current state of worship songwriting and production is to create something different.
How can we be sure that we are getting a “solid spiritual diet” and not a “milky” one?
What might Christians of the Reformation tradition think of claims like these about the nature of salvation?
Jesus makes David’s words his own, because David’s words were Christ’s to begin with.
Although Jesus bodily ascended and is hidden from our earthly eyes, he is not far off.
The drama of Scripture is about God renaming us by bringing us into his image-bearing family once again. And it would take “a name above all names” to accomplish it.
This is an excerpt from part two of “On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service” by Mike Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023).
If it’s all a fiction spun by disappointed disciples, if it’s a mere symbol for the idea of an inner awakening, if it’s not a fact that Christ has been raised, then our grief and loss have no end, and we have no hope.
What if sin was truly removed and what if the one who took it from us had the power to conquer it’s curse and spit in the face of death?