A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.
For Bonhoeffer, Christ crucified, and the cross of the Christian life were not of peripheral importance, but foundational.
While we often talk about our growth, our progress, and what we are doing for the kingdom of God, the reality is that any goodness in a Christian does not originate in us.

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Jesus loved us and gave himself up to save us. He would not abandon you to your hurt or cast you away because of the hurt you caused others.
Jesus has instituted his living-breathing disciples, his shepherds in his church, to declare the full forgiveness of sins.
To obtain this righteousness, you have to admit you don’t have it and could never produce it on your own because you are unrighteous.
When joined with a good Reformation theology of vocation and the freedom of a Christian, Fujimura’s vision for culture care is something all Christians can embrace, regardless of whether they are artists in the formal sense.
This is an edited excerpt from Addendum A, “The Church Year,” On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service, written by Michael Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023), pgs. 113-120.
Success is emphatically not your primary identity.
We know we are made for something great. We humans were created in God’s image and restored through Christ in his perfect image.
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.
The seemingly small, the particular, the previously overlooked, magnifies in importance.
The death and resurrection did indeed really happen. They are accomplished historical facts, and by them, so too is the forgiveness of our sins and justification before God.
The number forty calls to remembrance narratives of God’s great acts of redemption, but also our conformity to and participation in those narratives.
The more I got to know Dr. Rosenbladt, the more I saw that he wasn’t a man divided.