We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
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.

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We preach, teach and confess the virgin birth, and rightly so, but the actual sign is not the Virgin giving birth, it is the Child who is born.
The Church becomes anti-church when the new world order Christ inaugurated by eliminating demographic division through the commonality of Baptism is exploded by allegiance to cults of personality.
This is the wonder which is present in the calling of the disciples. Not how they drop their nets to follow Jesus, but that Jesus does not need to go far to find disciples. He chooses the people He lives among.
From all accounts, everyone in Nazareth would have just thought of Jesus as a very good boy who obeyed his parents and worked hard with his father as a tekton’s apprentice in the family trade.
This is what makes the reading from John so frightening and yet so exciting. Notice how Jesus appears. Not in miracles, not in marvels, but in relationships.
One name repeatedly emerges from the heart and mind of Paul: Jesus. Jesus is Messiah, Jesus is Savior, Jesus is the world’s rightful and reigning King.
For the Israelites, the language of restoration cannot be separated from the language of resurrection.
The Word of God, the Eternal Logos, Jesus Christ himself is revealed to us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Little by little, we find that God hands us his story as our own.
It is that Christmas carol, the curious “We Three Kings” that we are looking at today in our examination of the origin and meaning of Christmas carols.
The Holy Spirit is fixated on Jesus and it is the Spirit’s mission to bring us to faith in Him for He is the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
Under the lordship of the crucified and risen Emmanuel, our existence is one of blessedness. Blessedness means we are not under the condemnation of the Law, but the benediction of God’s favor here in time and, hereafter, in eternity.
Instead of defining the true church in the way of the law, Augustine approaches the issue pastorally in the way of the gospel.