The church is not renewed when one pastor tries to do the work of the whole body. The church is renewed when Christ’s body begins to act like a body again.
This is what Christian catechesis does; it turns the knobs of the Scriptures and throws the doors of God’s word wide open to tell us the story of salvation.
Christianity isn’t simply a tool to fix social, spiritual, or economic problems. Its claims are much larger, touching upon truth itself and therefore all things and all people.

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Because peace is a gift and not a product, you can’t work your way into it. However—you can receive it by grace.
From the junkyard of my past, I assembled the scrap metal of self-preservation, self-righteousness, and unalloyed selfishness, to weld together a hollow divinity. In its core, I stuffed myself: a god without divinity, offering forgiveness with conditions, to sinners without love.
Character development? Change? Saying that it’s behind you? Yeah right. You’re just saying that because you want your nice polished image back. You haven’t changed. We know. We’ve got the receipts.
God doesn’t give us second chances. No one earns another shot at forgiveness. We cannot earn forgiveness, it’s too costly.
A truly Christian work is it that we descend and get mixed up in the mire of the sinner, taking his sin upon ourselves and floundering out of it with him, not acting otherwise than as if his sin were our own.
This is an excerpt adapted from “Let the Bird Fly” written by Wade Johnston (1517 Publishing, 2019).
Jesus continues to breathe His gifts on His beloved. He continues to breathe absolution upon sinners like me and you, He continues to fill us with the Holy Spirit and all His comfort.
Sometimes I think I've gone through the whole forgiveness process, but forgiveness for me often feels like I'm weeding my garden. I forgive and another offense pops up.
He is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters, even as we curse and yell at him for not pleasing us with our pettish wishes.
There is a repentance that is anti-repentance, for it clings tightly to the sin over which it sorrows, because in that sorrow is its consolation. In this warped spiritual scheme, our anguish is atonement; shame is our absolution; tears are our baptism. We feel better knowing how bad we feel about our wrongs. But there is a much better way.
He is our gold. He is our pure garment. He is our healing. He is our sanity. He is our wholeness.
Both Hus and Luther arrived at the same conclusion: neither councils nor the pope had final authority in the church. Headship in the church belongs solely to Christ.