1. What we discover in O’Connor’s stories and Martin Luther’s theology is that God’s grace is elusive because the human heart is resistant to it.
  2. We can’t predict the harvest. We can only sow.
  3. The hardest thing you and I will ever be called to do is to believe that it is done already, that it really and truly is finished.
  4. If you interpret James, as most do, as an encouragement toward proving your faith by your works and then say it is your "favorite" then you are proclaiming that your favorite thing about the Christian faith is the practical outworking, the proving your faith by your works.
  5. A Christian is a man who desires to enter heaven not through his own goodness and works, but through the righteousness and works of Christ.
  6. To believe God is love and thus loves you is a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit.
  7. We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
  8. Forty days after giving birth, Mary, along with her husband Joseph, presented their firstborn Son at the temple and "bought" him back with a sacrifice of two small birds. This is known as the "Presentation of Our Lord."
  9. This is an excerpt from “The Alien and the Proper: Luther's Two-Fold Righteousness in Controversy, Ministry, and Citizenship,” edited by Robert Kolb (1517 Publishing, 2023). Now available for purchase.
  10. This is an excerpt from “The Alien and the Proper: Luther's Two-Fold Righteousness in Controversy, Ministry, and Citizenship,” edited by Robert Kolb (1517 Publishing, 2023).
  11. The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.
  12. The law had to have its way with the expert to bring him around (and back) to Abraham's response.