One great thing about our post-denominational age is that it has opened up opportunities to make common cause with other Lutherans who, despite their differences and eccentricities, can agree on some of the most important things.
Pride builds identities that leave no room for grace.
We can willingly admit the fact that we're just like tax collectors and thieves.

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I say I was dead before Jesus called me, but actually, I was worse off than that. Imagine a corpse who is at war with life, who is an enemy of the Life-giver. That was me.
I hoped like mad they’d spit in my face and laugh me all the way out of town. I wouldn’t have even cared if a mob of them had beat me to death in a back alley. But heavens no, I couldn’t be that lucky.
Even putting to the side More’s purposes in the writing of Utopia, and Bolt’s in composing A Man for All Seasons, certain contexts pertaining to each are revealing.
Of all the words this woman ever spoke, these alone are chiseled forever into the stone of holy writ, and into the church’s memory. Mrs. Job becomes the patron saint of quick-tongued women.
Hell is just as happy with those who believe in a fake Jesus, as with those who believe in no Jesus at all. For there is no difference.
If I had hated him even while a child, in his late teens I grew to loathe him as the very antithesis of the man I wanted to be.
“Let’s face it,” my mom once told me, while delivering a lecture on making the right moral decisions in high school, “sinning is fun.”
The details vary, of course, but we too struggle to repair the heart broken by the tragic death of someone we love. We're dazed, angry, speechless.
I believe, however, that lurking behind every reason we don't forgive is one fundamental impulse: the desire, real or perceived, to control the offender.
O such is the crumbling fortress of the god of this world, but how it entices our flesh! For it looks like a house of candy to the Hansels and Gretels who wander through this world.
Why would God reject from Cain what he later accepted from and mandated of his people? So as far as the material itself, neither Cain’s nor Abel’s offering was superior.
I don’t need to watch a blood-soaked story on CNN or visit someone of death row to familiarize myself with the beast of depravity crouched within the human heart. I just need to look in the mirror, to stare deeply into the eyes that are a window to a soul that has journeyed down dark paths whose only illumination comes from the fires of hell.