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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That's how true faith talks. It doesn't talk about itself. It says "Thank you!" to the one who gives healing and salvation.
The oddness of this moment, at the beginning of Advent, is God’s way of saying, “The reason I’m here...”
Look the judge in the eye and pin your sin on Jesus, the divine judge’s son. Jesus knows you can’t do it, so he trades places with you and pits himself against God’s righteous demands.
Trust in the midst of trouble. That is what our Lord calls us to experience today.
Fourteen years ago, drowning in the muck of dark despair, in the middle of a life gone terribly wrong, I wrote in my journal, "I wonder how, once this is all over, how I’ll be, how I’ll turn out…” Now I know.
Everywhere we look, there is suffering. But Jesus is not calling us to look. He is calling us to listen.
Grace and mercy are a powerful act of the Almighty God. God alone can grant forgiveness and restoration, salvation from the sorrow of this world.
What do Habakkuk and Israel have? Nothing but the word of God. Nothing but the promise of God. Nothing but God himself.
In his death, Jesus has done the ultimate act of charity. He has given his life for all.
The tragedy of the incidental Christ I was raised with is that he was really no Savior at all.
One could reason that God might, at least, give the church a little worldly power.
While the insights in each chapter are uniquely personal to the individual writers, the overarching theme is one of the sufficiency of Christ.