We are invited to entrust everything to the one who accomplished what we could not: living and bleeding and dying and rising again, so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). To put it another way, when it comes to the kingdom of God, there’s no room for DIY’ers. Best leave it to the professionals.
We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
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.

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But when God's Word of Law and Gospel are tuned up, when they're properly distinguished, then Jesus' words rain down on us like thunderbolts.
He barely wakes to find himself nearly dead; even so, he can’t feel a thing.
The arrangement was made with Abraham when God claimed for Himself all of his being, and put the seal of His promise upon the most personal member of his anatomy.
We who fall within the Protestant camp of Christianity have longstanding issues with ritual. I get that. Ritual is often abused. Idolatrized. It can easily devolve into a hollow act of religious farce.
No, when the Lord is ready for battle, of all creatures, he commissions Mary’s little lamb.
Burdened within and without, we cross the threshold into church. We don't leave behind our earthiness, our tragedies, our white-knuckled grip on the last vestige of dignity in our sad lives.
Thankfully, our heavenly Father sent a Champion into the game to take our place. What we failed to do, He accomplished.
I looked up at the cross and saw what God had become to bring me home. He had become what I was.
It doesn’t matter how good you seem to be, you’ll always be able to find someone who seems better than you. We’re addicted to comparing, measuring, quantifying, and judging.
This was one of the most haunting and soul tormenting verses in the Bible for me when I was growing up.
One of my podcast addictions is Criminal. Their tagline is “Criminal is a podcast about crime. Stories of people who've done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle.”
What is most amazing to me is not that Jesus welcomed public transgressors into his company. What astounds me is that they came to him with the full expectation of not being turned away.