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.

All Articles

I stumbled down labyrinthine paths, crawled in and out of cavernous pits, got lost a million times, and somehow ended up a little farther down the road to healing. Yet in all those crooked lines I see the hand of God writing straight.
We believers are those who have been called out for a special healing mission in the world because we’ve caught a glimpse of the heavenly city.
The more law-centered a church becomes, the more it and the world become kissing cousins.
I have found that Gandalf’s words above ring true, not only in Middle-earth, but in our world as well.
The kind of peace Jesus points to can't be achieved with words.
Asking whether one's beliefs are the right ones is terrifying.
What is most amazing to me is not that Jesus welcomed public transgressors into his company. What astounds me is that they came to him with the full expectation of not being turned away.
She had obviously heard about Jesus previously, maybe even from off-handed comments or even rumors. Her daughter was sick so she sought the gossiped-about Jesus as he was leaving for Tyre and Sidon.
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.
On Sunday mornings, when I confess my sins, I say that “I am heartily sorry for them and sincerely repent of them.” But those adverbs are like two accusing fingers pointed at my less-than-heartily-sorry, less-than-sincerely-repentant heart.
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.
Every child builds. Some build castles out of wooden blocks handed down from an older sibling. Some construct forts out of blankets, chairs, and miscellaneous living room artifacts.