We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
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.

All Articles

Today is Friday the 13th of February and that means tomorrow we celebrate Valentine’s Day. Two days back-to-back that most people recognize as being very different.
Mark Twain would have been proud of me. He once quipped that the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you figure out why. Not only had I figured out why I came into this world; my answer defined me.
On January 21st, former Newsboys guitarist and co-founder George Perdikis wrote an article titled, “I Co-Founded One of the Most Popular Christian Rock Bands Ever… and I’m Now An Atheist” which gained quite a bit of buzz.
Today, however, it seems that apologetics tends to be a performance rather than an authentic dialog, an exercise in being clever rather than being compelling, and a source of self-satisfaction rather than an invitation to risky but respectful engagement.
It’s like I’m eavesdropping on the two friends and the stranger who walks with them. Something about the way they hang their heads, something about the desperation in their voices, and certainly something about the stranger, has me grasping hold of every word as if gold is spilling from their lips.
I’ve always been taken aback by how much apologetic ink is spilled over understanding Genesis in the light of contemporary science, usually evolutionary biology.
I thought I had it all together. I had my life figured out. Even though outwardly I was serving God, inwardly I served only the god named Ego. My heart was the shrine at which I bowed the knee.
That’s what I mean when I say that I’ve struggled with atheism. And still do. The suffering me becomes the questioning me who becomes the doubting me who becoming the unbelieving me.
Yes, I pray, but it is the Spirit who prays for me, in me, through me. I no more make up my own prayers than I made up the English language.
The 21st century is simply not compatible with a reformational mindset. Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) that conservative Christians better serve their secular neighbors as specimens in a cultural zoo, relics of a bygone world.
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.
Your primary purpose in life is having something done to you. God created you in order that He might have someone to give to, to bless, to love, to nurture, to save, to give Himself to.