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.
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.

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It’s one of my favorite family pictures. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on a couch are my granddad, my dad, me, and my son. A four-generation snapshot: Lee Roy to Carson to Chad to Luke.
On that night in Bethlehem so long ago, not even your mother who held you in her arms understood that you had come to turn the world upside down in a through-the-looking-glass sort of way.
While reading Matthew chapter 2 where the story of the Three Kings, Wise Men, or Magi is found, I was captivated by the part King Herod played in the story. Herod, who had befriended Mark Anthony and Octavius, had been given the rule of Palestine and was crowned King of the Jews.
Please... don’t say any variation of, “cheer up.” or “look on the bright side.” Don’t invalidate what someone is going through because you may not understand.
As I remember these stories of the other side of Christmas—where it’s not a wonderful life, where there’s no joy to the world, where silent nights are interrupted by screams and sobs and cursing and gunshots—I remember that this other side of Christmas is precisely why there is a Christmas in the first place.
The advent is an incredible time for the church. We focus in on and celebrate Christ's first coming in anticipation of His second advent: The restoration of all things.
He loved me, to be sure, but in a very nondescript, emotionally detached way, which is the way my grandfather loved him.
Although I believe my Catholic friends say more of Mary than can be biblically justified, I also believe that many of my Protestant friends say less of Mary than the Bible demands.
For most of us, waiting on God is not funny at all. It makes us wonder if he cares. If he has forgotten us. In our darkest hours, many even wonder if the atheists are right, if our prayers are nothing more than sick words vomited into an empty heaven.
Rather than praying a lie by pretending all is well, this psalm places upon our lips a truthful plea. A godly complaint. These are God’s words, given as gifts to you, by which you can speak back to him.
It is Tolkien's adept ability at combining imagination with Sub-Creation to give his fictional world of Middle-Earth that ‘inner consistency of reality’ which points to the truth of the Gospel.
Paul's conversion is a death and resurrection story. And in reality, so is every conversion, whether it was an awe-inspiring experience like Paul's or not. Dead to sin and alive in Christ.