Christianity doesn’t start with our speculation about God. It starts with God’s self-revelation.
Christ did not merely urge humanity to be kind. He embodied perfect kindness by giving his life for those who neither earned nor expected such a gift.
Wade Johnston, Life Under the Cross: A Biography of the Reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis: MO, 2025.

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I hope your people expect and even demand this of you. But how we proclaim the central message, that can (and probably should) vary.
I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.
This is an excerpt from “The Alien and the Proper: Luther's Two-Fold Righteousness in Controversy, Ministry, and Citizenship,” edited by Robert Kolb (1517 Publishing, 2023). Now available for purchase.
Morons though we all have been, there is nothing we need that Christ hasn’t given us.
Though it may feel to us like the darkness is winning, God’s Word reveals the darkness is waning. The Light of the world has come.
The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.
When all the people had been baptized, when all the people had washed the filth of their sins into the water, Jesus went into the water to draw their sins unto Himself.
The usual acclamation when one becomes King is: “Long live the King!” But this King of kings, this son of David, has come to die.
Because we could never intuitively figure it out, God reveals Christ to us.
For almost three years, I have produced a weekly video in the series “Reading the Gospels through Hebrew Eyes.” Here is an index of all the Gospel readings covered so far, with links to their YouTube videos.
That great truth of creedal Christianity – that God is man in Christ – is not set forth for our speculative enjoyment.
It makes perfect sense that the day honoring Jesus' birth would be observed in a decidedly less than refined manner.