Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.
God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.

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The fact that baptism specifically unites me to Christ in his death means that I share in his sufferings in my identity, not in my activity.
In both Psalms, we hear the Messiah becoming sin for us, and thus he pleads on our behalf before the Father
God doesn’t give us second chances. No one earns another shot at forgiveness. We cannot earn forgiveness, it’s too costly.
This is an excerpt from “With My Own Eyes” written by Bo Giertz and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2017).
What does it take to be a Christian? Christ.
This is an excerpt from the book, “Paul and the Resurrection” written by Joshua Pagán (1517 Publishing, 2020).
We’ve become experts at making deals with God.
A truly Christian work is it that we descend and get mixed up in the mire of the sinner, taking his sin upon ourselves and floundering out of it with him, not acting otherwise than as if his sin were our own.
Even as children of God, we have down days. That’s just a fact of being sinful and living in an evil world.
Only when we stand where God has located Himself for us do we find an imperishable promise.
How does God feel about us sinners? God loves us so much that His stomach aches. His insides hurt. He refuses to let our sins separate us from Him. He refuses to let us die.
Jesus continues to breathe His gifts on His beloved. He continues to breathe absolution upon sinners like me and you, He continues to fill us with the Holy Spirit and all His comfort.