We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
Luther neither removed the Apocrypha from the Bible nor discouraged its use. Rather, he received and preserved the ancient distinction inherited from the fathers: the Apocrypha is valuable, edifying, and worthy of reading, but it is not Holy Scripture and therefore cannot serve as the foundation of Christian doctrine.
The confessors at Augsburg remind us that every generation of Christians is called to bear witness to the gospel amid the challenges and pressures of its own age. As they confessed Christ before emperors and kingdoms, so the Church continues to confess Him before the world today.

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On the television show Portlandia—a satirical comedy centered on hipster culture in Portland, Oregon—one episode highlights a conversation between the characters as Carrie and Alexandra look through Fred’s endless photo album of the places he’s traveled.
Sometimes we try be the bad god, sometimes the good god, oftentimes a freaky hybrid of both. The result is the same: Jesus the savior just gets in our way.
It's easy to forget that today, just like then, most people who laud Luther publicly as a reformer, revolutionary, and so on, secretly reject his teaching because it's too much to take.
by Philip Melanchthon, translated by Scott L. Keith, Ph.D.; edited by Kurt Winrich
This evening we will together take a very abbreviated look at what led Luther down the long road to the discovery of the Gospel.
The same can be said of the Reformation. I have often heard both Roman Catholic and Lutheran brothers and sisters bemoan the celebration of the Reformation.
You became, for a time, ritually unclean. Not sinful. Not immoral. To be unclean meant you bore in your own body the effects of a creation in bondage to decay.
All our little laws reveal that we are, by nature, trying to justify ourselves before others, and before God, based on what we do and who we are.
We fly away to the judgment seat of God. There we shall appear before the One who knows all, before whom nothing is hidden. Do you really think you can conceal anything from Him?
Dear church, do not get sidetracked. This is about far more than terrorism, racism, gun ownership, and the like. This is about the evil of the human heart.
The time constrained authoring of the Augustana caused great angst, for the part of Melanchthon that was never satisfied with his own literary output.
As the story unfolds we see Luther’s Heidelberg theses on display, even before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell.