‘Peace’ means “I have forgiven all those sins against me.”
This is an excerpt from Remembering Your Baptism: A Sinner Saint Devotional (1517 Publishing, 2025) by Kathy Morales, pgs 6-9.
Paradoxes hold everything together, not just in Inception’s plot, but in your life and mine.

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The greatest, wisest, most mind-blowing teachers in the church are all dead. Yes, they’re fully alive with Christ, but for our purposes, they’re dead.
What did Christians do, both when they encountered a Rome in its glory, as when Christ was born, and in it decline, as when Constantine tried to pull stuff back together?
There is just something about the idea of not being ‘under Law’ that sets off all kinds of alarms in the minds of many Christians.
God’s telling a joke. And after we’re done laughing at this silly divinity, we realize that the true joke is on us.
Whenever I read the Genesis account of Abraham, I’m more impressed that he’s often a clumsy, mess of a man than that it’s “faith that’s accounted to him as righteousness.”
We all look forward to Lent’s conclusion and the celebration of Resurrection Sunday. This is the Sunday of victory and joy as the Church enters into the reality that Christ has defeated death and hell, declared victory over such enemies and set history on its final course of consummation.
As sinful humans, we are adept at taking what God gives as gift and making it into a work. Nowhere is this made more evident than in the universally misunderstood doctrine of sanctification.
No matter how great our efforts or how righteous our intent, we will go from troubled to scared, and scared to terrified, unless we are sprinkled with the blood of the Lamb.
God goes to work on us through His Word like a woodcarver chisels a block of wood.
In him, retribution is set aside. Forgiveness comes. A new order begins. Remember that God’s mission will prevail, because grace is in, with, and under the fabric of human history.
While I was still an over-eager seminarian the professor warned me, “Mr. Riley, this is exciting stuff.
Freedom from the Law does not come through personal perfection, it comes through Jesus Christ. The answer is not a better you, but a you who is united to God through Christ.