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.
The confessors at Augsburg remind us that every generation of Christians is called to bear witness to the gospel amid the challenges and pressures of its own age. As they confessed Christ before emperors and kingdoms, so the Church continues to confess Him before the world today.
When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.

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It's a new year, and you are still the same you: a sinner who is simultaneously perfect in every way because Christ declares it to be so.
While Christmas may or may not have pagan roots, it will certainly have a pagan future if Christians lose sight of what it is all about.
Show me a sinner, and I’ll write you a story of a God who saves them.
Our faith is precisely where Paul puts it, namely, in the blood of Christ.
More certain than death or taxes and more certain than “anything else in all creation” is the fact that God loves you.
Jacob is given the gospel afresh right when he needed it and it is because of this gospel that his faith is stirred up anew.
To obtain this righteousness, you have to admit you don’t have it and could never produce it on your own because you are unrighteous.
When joined with a good Reformation theology of vocation and the freedom of a Christian, Fujimura’s vision for culture care is something all Christians can embrace, regardless of whether they are artists in the formal sense.
The good news for Jacob is that God humbled himself so that he could lose a wrestling match to a man with a dislocated hip so that he could give him a new name.
This is an excerpt from Romans 14 in Romans: A Devotional Commentary by Bo Giertz, translated by Bror Erickson. (1517 Publishing 2018), pgs 79-80.
This is a companion article to “Johann Spangenberg on Dying Well”
Moltmann is gone now, but his theology will continue to provoke and provide.