This is an excerpt from this year’s 1517 Advent Devotional.
Thanksgiving, then, is not just about plenty. It is about redemption.
Why is it truly meet right and salutary that we should at all times and all places give thanks to God.

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That hunger to connect with one who is greater than we are will be satisfied only in the one who created that hunger within us in the first place.
When the Holy Spirit finally gave me a fresh set of ears, I heard—really heard—what He’d been saying all along. Baptism really does save.
I woke up this morning feeling restless. It could be the 7,000 holiday calories I have eaten every day for the past two weeks or it could be that a new year has started and so follows the resolutions.
As God is prone to do, He sometimes shows us who He is through people whom we would never think of as teachers, much less imitators of God.
We usually understand vocation in a very narrow sense; it’s your job, your “calling.” Vocation, however, is not so much what you do for a living but what Christ does through you for the living. It’s a 24/7 calling, not a 9 to 5 occupation.
Ultimately, however, I fell in love with traditions—and specifically, traditional worship—for a single, overarching reason: its components, to varying degrees, are all in the service of the Gospel.
The pastor put a hand over my mouth, another between my shoulder blades, and backward I fell into the dark waters, buried beneath Noah's flood, the Red Sea, Jordan's stream, all the way down into a borrowed tomb outside Jerusalem where a crucified man lay waiting for me.
Yet as we mourn, but unlike those who have no hope, so also we repent, but unlike those who have no absolution. For we though we weep, there is a hand that dries all tears.
King has some kind of belief in God, but was probably under no inner compulsion to do anything we would term evangelism.
O little flock, fear not the foe, for at your head is the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for you.
We may seem destitute of hope, but the hope of Christ is stronger than our weakness.
Your primary purpose in life is having something done to you. God created you in order that He might have someone to give to, to bless, to love, to nurture, to save, to give Himself to.