Wisdom and strength require bootstrap-pulling and the placing of noses to grindstones.
“If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith?

All Articles

What Jesus promises is better than justice. Jesus promises grace.
Sometimes I think we should be more tempted to laugh at the gospel than we are, not in derision but in sheer surprise and awe.
With Christ as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, the future is secure already. It’s solid right now, even when the cords seem to be fraying.
This is not just a pericope about hereditary sin and actual sins, nor is it providing a pattern for prayer. It is fundamentally about God our gracious Father and His promise to hear us, answer us, and provide for us.
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
But it is not always helpful to create tidy categories of good and bad and to say, “Stop being ‘a Martha’ and do a better job of being ‘a Mary.’” That is a dangerous sermon to preach. In doing so, we can fall into the very thing we see Martha doing.
Moses is no Jesus but he, like us, is saved by Him. The law cannot enter the promised land, and yet the true and greater promised land is occupied by nothing but lawbreakers.
Through Martin Luther, God would unleash a far greater storm than the one which overwhelmed Luther on July 2, 1505.
With every bone in our bodies, we declare war on grace. We declare war on the gift.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is both a call to faith in Jesus and a call to love our neighbor.
The undercurrent of Scripture is the sheer fact that Jehovah God is a God of his word.
The world hates Jesus because he comes to lead us to love and forgive all, including our enemies.