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?

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The creation of this word reminds us that the Magnificat, like Christmas itself, is charged from the start with joy and praise.
Big or small, potential or certain, the despair we may grapple with during this time of year tends to find its end in the fact that things are not as they should be.
Jesus is both the image bearer and the image giver. In Jesus’ incarnation we are redeemed and re-imaged.
Sometimes it is the unnamed characters in the Bible who can most help present-day readers find their own place in the biblical story.
“The days are coming,” and God said it. God, who kept his promise that Christ would come at Christmas.
Like Isaiah and John, we look forward to that great and glorious day, trusting the resurrected One will return as He promised.
The oddness of this moment, at the beginning of Advent, is God’s way of saying, “The reason I’m here...”
Trust in the midst of trouble. That is what our Lord calls us to experience today.
The church is the only place God promises to lift us out of ourselves not in order to become more like God but so that we may finally be freed from our obsession with becoming little gods.
This is an excerpt from “The New Testament Devotional Commentary: Volume 1: Matthew, Mark, Luke” written by Bo Giertz and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2021).
Without the sacraments, God’s grace is simply an artifact behind a glass-case in a museum. We might be able to describe and even admire it, but we never get firsthand access to it.
Everywhere we look, there is suffering. But Jesus is not calling us to look. He is calling us to listen.