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.
When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.

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Take away the communal aspect, take away the communal gathering around Christ’s body and blood, and the Christian will begin to suffer a malnutrition of faith.
As the sin-bearer, Jesus was also the sin-confessor in the psalms.
“Poverty of spirit” is not an ethical value we strive for. It is an act of God’s mercy spoken to the deepest recesses of our soul when it’s overwhelmed by God’s grace.
God invites you to confess the skeletons in your closet so that he might bury them in the grave for good.
Christian hope means always hope in God and hope in Christ simultaneously without distinction.
The only one truly blessed of God, who in himself is God’s incarnate makarios, surrounds himself with a multitude of the accursed, the non-makarios.
This is an edited excerpt from “The Pastoral Prophet: Meditations on the Book of Jeremiah” written by Steve Kruschel (1517 Publishing, 2019).
Hermeneutics in Romans: Paul’s Approach to Reading the Bible is now available from 1517 Publishing
This is an excerpt from “Hermeneutics in Romans: Paul’s Approach to Reading the Bible” written by Timo Laato (1517 Publishing, 2021). Now available for preorder.
Everyone is living as a naked sufferer who’s been duped into believing that the nakedness of suffering has to be covered up.
We prefer God to forgive our sin by not paying attention to it. Then our prayer is not for grace but that God would overlook and wink at us from the sidelines.
If you and I were to examine our own lives, we’d likely have to admit that we are frequent disciples of Jeroboam’s “bootleg religion.”