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.

All Articles

Where Jesus says, “She’s not dead, she’s sleeping,” death dies.
The Gospel is our freedom from sin. It is Christ in the mirror, Christ for me and for you.
We take what we perceive to be freedom and turn it into a new credo, a new law, an idol to be lifted up and lived out.
Let’s take a walk together. And as we do, I’ll tell you a mystery.
Gospel questions don’t get a Law answer. Religious questions beg for Law answers.
Perhaps if we indulged our Christian freedom around them, they would come to see that “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
We are caught up in a battle between two kings and two kingdoms. And, whether we like it or not, we are ruled by one king or the other.
Jesus dies for the sin of the world. That means he dies for the person who disappoints us. He shed His blood for the person who doesn’t love us the way we want to be loved.
Our meditation listens to the King of Kings when He says; it is finished.
No matter how loving we are, we don’t get bonus points with the Almighty for imitating Jesus. We love each other because we recognize that “this is one for whom Jesus died.
It can be argued that this scene sets a pattern for Christian activity on the first day of the week from that time until the present.
When guilt becomes our totem, it dictates our idea of right and wrong and enslaves us to the fear of what happens when we open our eyes tomorrow morning.