We can bring our troubles, griefs, sorrows, and sins to Jesus, who meets us smack dab in the middle of our messy mob.
Confession isn’t a detour in the liturgy. It’s the doorway.
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.

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So bondage meets freedom, and God becomes our Master through Christ.
Luther contends that even our best spiritual, theological, and moral efforts are insufficient to save us.
God created Israel to be the vessel into which he would place both his Law and his Son.
Rather than presenting Christ’s words as a rule or a threat, Luther reveals it to be the promise of God.
These teachings are the heart of the Reformation…If it is about you, it isn’t about Jesus.
The power and the purpose of the Reformation was to bring the full force of the Law and the Gospel to the ears of sinners.
The Law though it does many things—restrains, exhorts the Christian unto righteousness, punishes—always rightly accuses and condemns sinners of their sin before a righteous, holy, and just God.
I spend a lot of time talking to people in coffee shops. Some share my Christian faith, some are exploring and questioning faith and others have left the church, having had a crisis of faith.
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
This emphasis in Luther also applied to his understanding of the sacraments, and particularly comes out in his writings on the Lord’s Supper in his Large Catechism.
Desiderius Erasmus and many humanists had for a while held out hope for Luther’s call for reform and many of the reformers were themselves, to some degree, humanists.
The sight of indulgences being bought and sold is just not something I witness on a regular basis.