A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.
For Bonhoeffer, Christ crucified, and the cross of the Christian life were not of peripheral importance, but foundational.
While we often talk about our growth, our progress, and what we are doing for the kingdom of God, the reality is that any goodness in a Christian does not originate in us.

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The phrase “works of the law” has an antithesis when it comes to righteousness—faith. What keeping the Law could not do, the gift of faith does.
No efforts to create worship as a delectable dish to attract people to our services will ever work, because it is only what God gives to us in His Word and Sacrament that can satisfy the hungry and thirsty soul.
To preach Christ and Him crucified is to reveal again the revealed God who saves.
Clarity enables mobility. When preachers make the message clear, the people of God are freed-up to follow Jesus.
The reason that God’s commandments are not burdensome is that Jesus has fulfilled them.
This parable does its surprising work of turning everything upside-down, as Christ’s Kingdom always does.
Jesus is the only one who is His brothers’ keeper on behalf of all of humanity and the only one who answered the rhetorical question fully and correctly for you.
Jesus speaks His Word, and a new world order emerges, with the possibility of uniting disparate parties in the true faith.
The love mentioned in 1 John 4:15-21 fourteen times (!) is a love that needs no apology but is determined at all times to sacrifice for the other.
We can appreciate what we have received from God, we can receive it all as free gift, but only when we stop investing in fool's gold.
Paul calls them the fruits of the Spirit after all
The true masterpiece of the Bible’s narrative is that we are blessed not in the way we want but in the way God gives freely on account of Christ alone.