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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Without getting into specifics, I have suffered a loss that seemed at times unbearable. I cried. I pleaded. I questioned. I prayed. I drank. Rinse. Repeat.
It may seem easy to believe in the God who changes water into wine, but it is not. For when man is at his happiest, he thinks the least of the true source of his joy.
I’m still piecing together fragments. I’ve spent my life collecting scraps of personal stories that will explain my father to me.
It’s one of my favorite family pictures. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on a couch are my granddad, my dad, me, and my son. A four-generation snapshot: Lee Roy to Carson to Chad to Luke.
He loved me, to be sure, but in a very nondescript, emotionally detached way, which is the way my grandfather loved him.
To be justified means to be declared righteous in the forgiveness that is ours in the crucified Christ. It is a done deal, and by faith we have it all.
I stumbled down labyrinthine paths, crawled in and out of cavernous pits, got lost a million times, and somehow ended up a little farther down the road to healing. Yet in all those crooked lines I see the hand of God writing straight.
Ultimately, the lie we have believed is that God is like we are. He is not. Thank God that he is not. He is the Lord who reverses all our expectations.
For most of us, waiting on God is not funny at all. It makes us wonder if he cares. If he has forgotten us. In our darkest hours, many even wonder if the atheists are right, if our prayers are nothing more than sick words vomited into an empty heaven.
Rather than praying a lie by pretending all is well, this psalm places upon our lips a truthful plea. A godly complaint. These are God’s words, given as gifts to you, by which you can speak back to him.
Job’s friend Zophar had it up to here! He was done hearing Job defend himself in the midst of his suffering. Surely, Job must have done SOMETHING to bring all this calamity upon himself.
His glory is made known precisely in the cross, His strength in weakness, His wisdom in folly, His exaltation in humiliation.