Luther felt the reform of the church could not simply remain a matter of aesthetics and practice. Something much deeper needed to be rooted out.
While God can, and often does, appear to people face to face, he also often employs the use of several types of messengers.
The “further up and further in” we go, the table keeps getting bigger, the guest list keeps getting longer, and the grace keeps on flowing.

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This is an excerpt from the introduction of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted written by Gretchen Ronnevik (1517 Publishing, 2021), 122-125. Now available for preorder.
Luther saw that God demands not that we become perfectly righteous like God but that we simply receive the gift of righteousness; a gift that actually makes us worthy.
Absolution is the word God speaks to cause his sin-dead creation to live.
Those called out for their sins, who find themselves knee deep in their transgressions, always need grace.
It’s God’s love that sets us free to love in the first place.
God has a strange delivery system, the foolish preaching of the cross and foolish preachers for Christ’s sake delivering it.
Trusting in Christ’s promise of new life and deliverance pours patience and hope into the way we think and the way we experience life.
If sin is only a matter of “doing,” then “undoing” and/or “redoing” would serve as the equivalent savior necessary to find redemption.
Undue Protestant antipathies toward Mary have muted not only her place in redemption history and its necessary connection to Christology, but also the virtue of virginity.
Jesus lives to intercede. So we needn’t bring him our feigned righteousness or our faux rehabilitation.
If we want to see evidence of our Father’s answer to the fifth petition, we need only to look at the cross and the empty tomb.
Our ears are opened by the Spirit through the word. Then, faith in Christ is present in us.