1. Although Jesus bodily ascended and is hidden from our earthly eyes, he is not far off.
  2. The drama of Scripture is about God renaming us by bringing us into his image-bearing family once again. And it would take “a name above all names” to accomplish it.
  3. This is an excerpt from part two of “On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service” by Mike Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023).
  4. This is an excerpt from the prologue of “On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service” by Mike Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023).
  5. The needs of the people remain the same, but now the people are you and me. We still sin, and that sin causes so many challenges in our lives.
  6. Human history, our history, is the story of two Adams with two very different encounters with the devil.
  7. What we discover in O’Connor’s stories and Martin Luther’s theology is that God’s grace is elusive because the human heart is resistant to it.
  8. We don't make Church "happen." Only Christ can do so. It's his happening.
  9. I hate to break it to you, but "are" is not an action verb. "Are" is a being verb.
  10. This is the message of Lent. We are not called to sacrifice for Jesus in order to earn our salvation. Rather, we are called to remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for us.
  11. As disciples of Jesus, our righteousness cannot be performed before others, because our righteousness was already performed by Jesus.
  12. Even if the numbers are bad, the news about Jesus crucified for sinners and raised to new life hasn’t become any less good.