Jesus is not a god that we can manipulate and mold. Christ is the true God, the one who is.
The most sober lesson we can learn from life’s caves is that all we have is a Person, one who never withers or distances himself from us, even though we are weak and languishing.
Yahweh tells his people that they “shall have no other gods before me,” he’s speaking into a culture whose very fabric is made up of the worship of other gods.

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Your eternal salvation isn’t dependent on performance or effort. Well, not your performance anyway...
The following is an excerpt from Law and Gospel in Action written by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2019).
Like the Pharisees, as well-meaning, contemporary Christians we too can often add fences to God’s Law.
The history of the early Reformation in the New World is both a tale of pirates and the battle of catechisms.
Pergamum! Oh, Pergamum! Behold the glory of Pergamum! It was not at this time the greatest provincial power, nor was it the most favored in the Roman Empire.
The prophet Jonah longed for one thing: to see the Assyrian city of Nineveh utterly destroyed by the wrath of God. His wish eventually came true
And so, when you preach the Law, you are also instructing the conscience and thereby forming it. For some of your hearers, this will result in activating their consciences, making them more sensitive, so they become more aware of their sin and more urgently seek the Gospel. For others, it is a re-instruction.
In our democratic society we love to talk about freedom. But anybody out there ever tried to be perfect? Ah, shucks. Turns out we’re not as free as we thought.
The preached word ensured the work of the Holy Spirit, so long as it was the written word of the Gospel. Gospel preaching was the one domain in which we could be assured of the convicting, saving, and sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.
From political parties to sports teams, we know all too well how quickly we can ruin a good thing, turning a temporal allegiance into a spiritual one
With a new year comes many new things. In the corporate world, we again introduced to our yearly performance review.
Despite the death all around us, the death that is assured us, we know there is a way out.