The life we are trying to manage, improve, and secure is not something to be mastered. It is something to be surrendered. And this is where everything changes. Because in Christ, the approval we are seeking has already been spoken.
It is within this charged atmosphere that Luther’s writings take on their full significance. His responses to the Turkish threat were not merely reactions to military events; they were rooted in a deep theological reflection on the nature of God’s rule over the world, the responsibilities of Christian rulers, and the role of the Church in times of crisis.
Your God is not artificially intelligent, but the source of all intelligence (including yours).

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In grace, God chooses to love his people.
This is an excerpt from Ditching the Checklist: Assurance of Salvation for Evangelicals (and Other Sinners) by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 5-7.
There is no one — not now, not ever — who cannot be included in the family of God through the efficacy of Christ’s saving power.
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.
The love of God is creative, always giving, always reviving.
In Scripture, laments are raw expressions of grief, but they always point to hope. What if our culture’s obsession with holiday lights is an unconscious way of crying out, “We need good news, and we need it now”?
More certain than death or taxes and more certain than “anything else in all creation” is the fact that God loves you.
Below is the Thinking Fellows Essential Reading List with contributions from each of the Thinking Fellows hosts.
It is Jesus himself who is the ladder by which sinners get to God, not by them climbing up but by God climbing down.
God does not give us an undebatable answer to suffering. Instead, God suffers, too.
Lutherans have a unique heritage that makes teaching predestination doubly difficult.
We can do nothing to warrant entry into the kingdom of God nor are we getting in if we think a seat at God’s table is something to which we are entitled.