One great thing about our post-denominational age is that it has opened up opportunities to make common cause with other Lutherans who, despite their differences and eccentricities, can agree on some of the most important things.
Pride builds identities that leave no room for grace.
We can willingly admit the fact that we're just like tax collectors and thieves.

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How can we best talk about the Gospel with an Old Testament accent? Chad Bird provides us with a helpful "map" that highlights Egypt, the Red Sea, and Jerusalem. These three places represent the ways in which God graciously redeems, delivers, and sanctifies us. This brief essay was delivered at the 1517 Regional Conference in Bentonville, Arkansas, on April 17, 2021.
God has a strange delivery system, the foolish preaching of the cross and foolish preachers for Christ’s sake delivering it.
What kind of shepherd does God provide? The answer, of course, starts and ends with Christ.
The biblical shepherd leads his sheep. He provides for their needs. He protects them from enemies, and he does not leave his sheep unattended.
The result of this day’s proceedings, in Luther’s mind, was likely to be a painful death at the stake.
Jesus rejects what we believe is most necessary and instead points us to his pain, suffering, death, and self-sacrifice.
The Holy Spirit does what his name implies. He makes us holy. We believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord, and come to him only by the Holy Spirit who calls us with the gospel.
Jesus’s touch of this leper is the touchstone of the gospel itself. It’s a living parable of his entire ministry.
Jesus is proclaiming the good news that he has come to put an end to laboring to be loved by God.
The cross is not some mystic metaphor for the change we must undergo before our self-realization, but the earth-shattering event that changed the course of eternity.
We will always need comfort until the reign of God, his kingdom, comes in full with Christ’s return, and our suffering and the sin that causes it is no more.
You have this Shepherd who knows your voice, your cry, your incessant baaing.