The greatest obstacle to friendship in middle age isn't that nobody wants friends. It's that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. But here's the good news: Christ has already gone first for you. And because He has, you are free to go first for someone else.
Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything under heaven. But God has also placed eternity in our hearts, and that makes us strange creatures: able to rejoice in this life yet always aching for a life that only Christ can give.
What does it take to draw near to God? It takes a perfect priest, a finished work, and a broken body to open the way. In short, it takes everything, which is exactly what Christ has given for you.

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This is an excerpt from “God’s Devil” written by John Warwick Montgomery (1517 Publishing, 2020).
The Earth itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed, just like our spirits in Holy Baptism, just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection.
Our passage from Romans steers us between these two dangerous misconceptions: The mythical monster Scylla of believing the body to be evil on the one shore, and the beast Charybdis of believing the body constitutes all there is on the other.
That is why we dance on graves. That is why we smile in the midst of sorrowful tears. That is why we retell old stories and share humorous memories.
If the world could have been saved by bookkeeping, it would have been saved by Moses, not Jesus. The law was just fine.
The biggest point Luther makes about the descent is not that Jesus triumphed over hell idle and unaffected, but that Jesus defeated hell by suffering hell away.
In our liquid world, strung out on the meth of evil, full of poor souls fighting to stay afloat, where are you, O God? Don't you care that we are perishing?
God doesn't help those who help themselves. He saves those who can't do anything for themselves.
When Christians die, heaven does not “get another angel.” We cannot become angels any more than we can become giraffes or ocean waves or stars. We are people and will remain so after this present life. God did not make a mistake when he made us human.
Spoiler alert! Jesus rose from the grave with the assurance that all believers will rise bodily with Him on the Last Day. And truth be told, Easter wasn't the first spoiler.
When God's Word went to the cross and made full payment for all our sinful, self-serving, self-seeking activities, and then rose from the dead, Jesus added an "always and forever" to our days and life.
Heaven may seem like a long way off right now, but it is as close to you as a gentle word spoken, a splash of water, a bit of bread, and a sip of wine.