Paradoxes hold everything together, not just in Inception’s plot, but in your life and mine.
We don’t flinch at sin. We speak Christ into it.
One might say that the first statement of the Reformation was that a saint never stops repenting.

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As an avid movie-goer, one of the ways Scripture comes alive for me is to picture the stories as if they were scenes and beats from a live-action movie.
You matter so much to God that he would rather die than lose you. You matter so much to Jesus that no suffering was too much, no deprivation too burdensome, no punishment too severe for him to endure to have you as his own.
Over and over, generation after generation, sinners repeat the same mistake. "How is it possible that God can be a man," we ask.
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.
Imagine if Zacchaeus posted on Jerusalem's Facebook a selfie with Jesus. The top dog among the tax-gougers with Christ at his dinner table. Oh, the outrage! The puritanical zealots would have been tweeting and blogging about it for months.
We find such a temptation when the devil causes us to question God’s election or predestination of us in “eternity as a past event” (i.e. “eternity-past”).
If you know me in the least, then you know of my fondness for the 2010 film Inception.
God’s desire that all be saved led him to pay the price by which all are saved, all are justified.
He lavishly pours out His rest in the waters of Baptism, in the spoken words of absolution from the pastor’s lips, in the preaching of the cross and resurrection, in the consumption of heavenly cuisine from the table at which He is host and meal.
When Dorothy, Toto and her 3 new friends finally arrived in Oz, they were met with a staggering disappointment. The Great and Powerful is Oz was not so great and powerful.
It is worthwhile because Jesus Christ gave baptism to His disciples as a means for making disciples after He had suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified died and buried and rose again on the third day.
A promise was made to my older brother roughly 50 years ago. He was just an infant and had no idea that this promise was being set upon him.