Luther felt the reform of the church could not simply remain a matter of aesthetics and practice. Something much deeper needed to be rooted out.
While God can, and often does, appear to people face to face, he also often employs the use of several types of messengers.
The “further up and further in” we go, the table keeps getting bigger, the guest list keeps getting longer, and the grace keeps on flowing.

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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.
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.
As the writer to the Hebrews affirms, what makes the Christian gospel so much better is that we are no longer dealing with “types and shadows."
God resolves his wrath through the unexpected giving of his Son.
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.