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

A person, not a nation, can be a Christian because only a person can be saved by grace through faith in the work of Christ.
Stories like Onoda’s offer an interesting parallel to our life in the Gospel.
God is always better than your imaginings. God is greater than your thoughts about God!
Only the ministry of the Gospel can forgive sins, even while civil government rightly carries out retribution for lawlessness and disobedience.
In these two stories - one ending and the other beginning just a day apart - we find many ingredients that are uniquely American. We find grit, determination, and conquest.
“Our “good destruction” happened about 2,000 years ago as Jesus Christ arose from the tomb and crushed the head of Satan, broke the jawbones of death, and snapped the chains of sin. ”
We do not, as followers of Jesus, put any hope or place any trust in “princes, in mortal man, in whom there is no salvation” (Ps. 146:3).
The Gospel restores us to our true humanity, embeds us in the body of Christ, feeds us with Christ’s own body, and offers us a community.
When we preach Jesus crucified for the sin of the world, Jesus crucified to put away God’s harsh judgment, that good news creates faith
In our own lives, we might find that the Law is not an alien word, whether we call it our conscience or our values, our Holy Writ, or our municipality’s laws and regulations
The lack of Gospel or abundance of Gospel and Christ’s gifts, more than anything else, determines whether we’ll be overrun by sin, death, and hell
With these words, Jesus at the same time acknowledges that earthly government is both divinely sanctioned and, at the same time, not to be conflated with the kingdom of God.