Paradoxes hold everything together, not just in Inception’s plot, but in your life and mine.
We don’t flinch at sin. We speak Christ into it.
One might say that the first statement of the Reformation was that a saint never stops repenting.

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He loved me, to be sure, but in a very nondescript, emotionally detached way, which is the way my grandfather loved him.
As C. S. Lewis, in "The Magician’s Nephew", has Aslan sing the world and all its beautiful intricacies into existence, so the Lion of the tribe of Judah, our Lord Jesus, hymns the heavens and earth into being.
Left to ourselves, we are like Adam and Eve; we sew together fig leaves of self-righteousness and hunker down behind trees of flimsy excuses to hide in vain from a judgment we deserve.
As Luther’s efforts at reform began to build, so did the vacancies in monasteries and convents across Europe as monks and nuns motivated by evangelical teaching left their orders for other vocations and opportunities, including marriage.
Is God the perfect loving father for whom we have all longed; or is he an angry, blood-thirsty deity who can only be appeased by the torture and death of his own child?
Here’s what lurks beneath this seemingly righteous behavior: they wanted to make a name for themselves, these tower-builders.
(This article first appeared in Modern Reformation and is posted here with permission.)
In Christ, we become part of the group of eight on the ark. The eight does not increase to nine or ten but swells to contain us all. God recreates us in this saving flood of baptism. We enter the new creation in Christ.
And there was heard, all round the world, the boom of a pounding hammer. And there resounded, all around the world, the cry of a righteous man who prayed for an unrighteous world.
The soles of the holy feet of God traverse the soil of the holy land of promise.
His reaction was totally wrong. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. When I’d finished confessing, he didn’t start yelling. Out of his mouth came words like forgiveness, grace, Christ, clean slate. He was saying all the wrong things.
First words may be simple, but they affirm a deep, abiding truth.