This is the third installment in the 1517 articles series, “What Makes a Saint?”
The Church speaks not with the cleverness of men, but with the breath of God.
I always imagined dying a faithful death for Christ would mean burning at the stake. Now, I suspect it will mean dying in my bed of natural causes.

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Who is God really? He is offensive, anarchic by the world’s standards, and far too gracious to people who don’t deserve his time or attention.
You are the friend in low places. It’s only from this place that you are free to look outside yourself for the remedy to the issues that plague you and humanity.
We live again, not so that we will now pay our debt, but to proclaim that we live because our debt was paid!
You are a child of God. You’re blameless, holy, perfect, and righteous. Don’t feel that way? Too bad. God is greater than your heart.
The epistle text from Colossians 1 declares how the great drama of redemption and human history ends.
We look forward to the return of Christ, which fills us with hope that there really is an end to this marathon called life.
As the church year ends, we are not give a vision of Jesus on His throne, ruling over a new creation. Instead, we see Jesus ruling from the cross. His grace comes in the midst of suffering and pain.
That is the task of preaching in these last weeks of the Church Year, to enable the people given to our care, to praise God from the perspective of the end when our Lord will return in glory bringing us into His Kingdom of glory.
The epistle text from Colossians 1 declares how the great drama of redemption and human history ends.
Preachers and church workers must also hear the gospel preached to them.
The mind-blowing part of this entire story, though, isn’t that only one leper came back to “give thanks,” but that the Lord Jesus healed all ten knowing full well that only one would come back.
You’re not new because of what you do. You’re new and so you do new things, even in spite of yourself, because of your sinful nature.