The temptation for many believers is either despair or outrage: despair that Christendom is fading, or outrage at the civilization replacing it.
Through baptism, absolution, and the Lord’s Supper, Christ meets you with his radical forgiveness which changes everything, even the self!
Do not disregard Luther’s early disputations, but appreciate their specificity and recognize their pastoral and theological continuity with his later works.

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Preaching the Word made flesh liberates the imagination from this world’s false and crippling vision of reality, and once again brings the imagination into an encounter with the one and only true and living God through Immanuel: “God with us.”
Whatever body part you are, the body of Christ is no pod person. Together, we’re a living, breathing, deathless whole.
We can see this as a foreshadowing of how the LORD always comes to His people—the people do not come to Him. So, it is God who sent His Son to us, His Promised One, up close and personal.
But it is not always helpful to create tidy categories of good and bad and to say, “Stop being ‘a Martha’ and do a better job of being ‘a Mary.’” That is a dangerous sermon to preach. In doing so, we can fall into the very thing we see Martha doing.
What might be a unique challenge of this text is how our preaching of it might itself resonate with its mystery. It goes to a broader question: How can we retain a sense of the “mysterious” in our preaching of mysterious texts?
Neomonasticism—that is, the idea that church work is more important than regular work—implies that God cares more about the spiritual than the physical.
With every bone in our bodies, we declare war on grace. We declare war on the gift.
[Because] of the relationship of presence the LORD has with His people, His holiness ‘gets on them,’ and, as a result, this is what their life now looks like because the holy LORD is their God.
Paul is giving thanks for the reality that the gospel grows just as much in the little places as it does in the centers of power.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is both a call to faith in Jesus and a call to love our neighbor.
Whether or not there be grand thoughts behind a text, it is guaranteed that behind each text the Holy Spirit is lying in wait, and He is trying to enter into conversation with you.
Christian mercy should not seek its own. It must be round, and open its eyes and look at all alike, friend and foe, as our heavenly Father does.