How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith?
As soon as people understand what crucifixion means, the cross becomes offensive.
This is the third installment in the 1517 articles series, “What Makes a Saint?”

All Articles

In Christ Jesus, through faith, we’ve received everything we need for our bodies and lives, and life eternal.
These words not only rescue and defend; they also attack.
I rededicated my life as many times as I could when the guilt was unbearable. I would read my Bible more and pray more, yet I still struggled. I knew deep down, I was breaking God’s heart with my failure at being his child.
There is no comfort in naked sovereignty. A bully may be said to be “sovereign” over the elementary school playground, but that doesn’t bring much comfort nor does it promise security. We need something more than a God who is in control.
Both Hus and Luther arrived at the same conclusion: neither councils nor the pope had final authority in the church. Headship in the church belongs solely to Christ.
Apart from God's word, we will judge the right to be wrong and evil people as good.
It is one thing to pray against death’s slow and aggressive assault on God’s creation. It is another to trust in the one who has conquered the grave.
God created humanity in his image and then inhabited that image. Not just for 33 years, but for eternity thereafter.
Christ presents to us such liberty, so that we as Christians according to our faith may tolerate no other master, but only hold that we are baptized and called unto Christ, and through him have become justified and sanctified.
It is that love, finally, which comes back again and again, not as an afterthought, but as the underlying theme of the entire section.
A change during a time of crisis is nothing new; it's an experience we can see throughout history.
Lack of effort isn’t the sworn enemy of fruit-bearing. Self-sufficiency is.