Luther neither removed the Apocrypha from the Bible nor discouraged its use. Rather, he received and preserved the ancient distinction inherited from the fathers: the Apocrypha is valuable, edifying, and worthy of reading, but it is not Holy Scripture and therefore cannot serve as the foundation of Christian doctrine.
The confessors at Augsburg remind us that every generation of Christians is called to bear witness to the gospel amid the challenges and pressures of its own age. As they confessed Christ before emperors and kingdoms, so the Church continues to confess Him before the world today.
When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.

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Salvation starts in being a sinner and knowing it because that's where God starts salvation, in making "Him to be Sin who knew no sin."
Among the things that perturb me about modern Christianity is our residual clinging to a sort of “Christian-karma.”
I grew up with a great deal of guilt. It still keeps me up at night. For one reason or another, I was convinced I hadn’t done enough to be loved by God.
In his Gospel account, Luke challenges us to play "Where is Jesus?"
On the television show Portlandia—a satirical comedy centered on hipster culture in Portland, Oregon—one episode highlights a conversation between the characters as Carrie and Alexandra look through Fred’s endless photo album of the places he’s traveled.
God coming to us at Christmas encapsulates the essence of Christian faith: we don't make ourselves strong and then work our way up to a strong God.
The devil is effective with this attack because it calls out all the things a Christian sinner experiences as simultaneous sinner and saint.
If the devil took over a church, I suspect it would be bursting at the seams every Sunday, with smiling faces, clean noses, straight morals, conservative voting, institutional fidelity
It's easy to forget that today, just like then, most people who laud Luther publicly as a reformer, revolutionary, and so on, secretly reject his teaching because it's too much to take.
by Philip Melanchthon, translated by Scott L. Keith, Ph.D.; edited by Kurt Winrich
This evening we will together take a very abbreviated look at what led Luther down the long road to the discovery of the Gospel.
Lose trust in the free grace of the righteousness of Christ alone, and the holiness of the Church and all in her is lost.