God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.
Salvation is not merely to be put in “safety” but to be put into Christ.
Bringing your family to church to receive “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) in Word and Sacrament honors and pleases God.

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The gospel fires up within us the gratitude, joy, and love to pull off what the law never could get us to do.
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.
Cyprian actually rejected the accusation that he believed in rebaptism because he considered only the baptism within the church to be a valid or true baptism.
The fact that baptism specifically unites me to Christ in his death means that I share in his sufferings in my identity, not in my activity.
We’ve become experts at making deals with God.
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).
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.
There is no justification except by faith alone. The radical forgiveness itself puts the old to death and calls forth the new.
I rededicated my life as many times as I could when the guilt was unbearable. I would read my Bible more and pray more, yet I still struggled. I knew deep down, I was breaking God’s heart with my failure at being his child.
Christ presents to us such liberty, so that we as Christians according to our faith may tolerate no other master, but only hold that we are baptized and called unto Christ, and through him have become justified and sanctified.
By basing our assurance on the promises of God, which we not only hope for in the future but live in now, the Christian can finally rest in the comfort that they are both saved and not responsible for their own salvation.