David finally found the truth that it was not his seed of kingship but the promise made to Abraham that made him holy. From that, David refused to be moved and wrote this Psalm by the necessity of the Spirit as the assurance of faith. The law never made a man holy, not even one as robust as David; yet faith did this great thing without lifting a finger.
Today, the longing for cultural Christianity on both the left and the right hearkens back to an older version of Christendom that was a mixed blessing for the church in the western world. The cultural mediation of Christian views on created order has certainly benefitted the civilization we’ve inherited. But the gospel itself isn’t something that can be reduced to cultural mediation either. Instead, the gospel as a message stands apart from all human accomplishments and achievements, no matter how beneficial they might be.
Josephus does not tell us that Christianity is true, and Christians do not need Josephus to tell them that Christ is risen. But Christianity makes claims about things that happened in public history under identifiable rulers, priests, and governors. For that reason, testimony from outside the church matters.

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God has a hall ready for us, for us and for so many more
How Leviticus 17 is a key passage for understanding atonement
The issue is not the existence of so-called inner rings, but our desire and willingness to spend our lives in order to gain from an inner ring what is freely promised in Christ: hope, security, and identity.
The only place to begin a discussion of human/creaturely identity is with our relationship to the God whose breath filled dust, brought us to life, sustains us and gives us a hopeful future.
The Lord knew how it felt to be a rejected stone.
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.
The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.
Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.
All our sin and shame is answered for in the death and resurrection of our Lord.
It all starts with God; and it all ends with God. He is the alpha and omega of giving and generosity.
You are a child of God. You’re blameless, holy, perfect, and righteous. Don’t feel that way? Too bad. God is greater than your heart.
That is the task of preaching in these last weeks of the Church Year, to enable the people given to our care, to praise God from the perspective of the end when our Lord will return in glory bringing us into His Kingdom of glory.