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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Where our sins are forgiven, there God in Christ is to be found.
This article is the second installment in an eight-part series inspired by the Lenten themes of catechesis, prayer, and repentance found in the Lord’s Prayer as Luther taught it in his Small Catechism.
The implications were clear: Jesus’ death destroyed the things that distinguished people as educated or uneducated, rich or poor, free or enslaved, black or white, pious or godless.
The Church gathers around the Word and Sacrament in order to receive Christ and each other.
His resurrection reveals that Jonah, and all of us, even the evilest people, are salvageable, even from suicide, in Jesus' death and resurrection.
We can rejoice in our own need and the gift we receive through baptism given by the same one by whom John desired to be baptized.
In our search for absolution, human beings leave no stone unturned. We’re desperate to have our uneasy consciences soothed.
We live in the strength of our baptism again and again and again, returning to it every day according to God's promise. 
The following is an excerpt from "Finding Christ in the Straw" written by Robert M. Hiller (1517 Publishing, 2020).
From all accounts, everyone in Nazareth would have just thought of Jesus as a very good boy who obeyed his parents and worked hard with his father as a tekton’s apprentice in the family trade.
In chapter 41 the servant is identified as Israel, but chapter 42 is a different servant. In fact, Matthew 12:18-21 makes the ID clear—this Servant is Jesus!