The Pharisee valued fasting and giving tithes, but could not find value in his fellow sinner.
God is not a tool in our hands. He does not exist to serve our goals, our metrics, or our platforms.
The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.

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So, what do we pray? What do we say? In times of fear, in times of chaos, in unprecedented times, we pray and say the words that have been written on our hearts.
As a parent listens for the cry of a hurting child, our heavenly Father waits for our cry of weal and woe.
In our transactional view of our faith - “If I don’t… then God won’t.” “I need to, so God can” - we are seriously underestimating who we are dealing with.
Hannah’s story is the story of God’s great reversal.
It turns out the family trait of not being able to wait runs deep and wide in the family of God. We do foolish things while we wait for promises to be fulfilled.
Many of us have experienced what it feels like to wait and to remain patient this year. This Advent, we are reminded of how the saints before us experienced similar feelings of uncertainty, need, and hopeful expectation as they awaited - both faithfully and unfaithfully - for God to fulfill his promises.
Like Luther and like Hannah, we also receive God’s promise.
This is an excerpt from Martin Luther’s Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1535), written by Martin Luther and translated by Haroldo Camacho (1517 Publishing, 2018).
Life will not go as planned nor as we would hope, but "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."
Although theirs is an impressive show of faith, the display of God’s faithfulness to them is far greater. After all, faith is only as strong as the object in which it is placed.
Now more than ever, it's good to take a closer look at the Christian confession about evil, pain, and suffering.
Good works do not make a Christian, do not secure the grace of God and blot out our sins, they do not merit heaven.