God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.
Salvation is not merely to be put in “safety” but to be put into Christ.
Bringing your family to church to receive “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) in Word and Sacrament honors and pleases God.

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At the Transfiguration, we say farewell to alleluia and hello to the horrific reality of our lost condition.
This is an excerpt from Faith in the Face of Tyranny: An Examination of the Bethel Confession Proposed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer & Hermann Sasse in August 1933, written by Torbjörn Johansson and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2023).
While we wait in tribulation for our white robes (or pants) to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, we confess to one another our seen and unseen stains.
It’s not our eloquence or persuasive rhetoric that changes hearts, but the Word of God that pierces through the hardened shells of unbelief and breathes life into the dead bones of sinners.
This is the Christian word: grace. Such grace is found only with this Lamb who is also our Shepherd.
The Lord knew how it felt to be a rejected stone.
Paul is writing as a man who has already lived a life of law-keeping while denying the resurrection.
The needs of the people remain the same, but now the people are you and me. We still sin, and that sin causes so many challenges in our lives.
Human history, our history, is the story of two Adams with two very different encounters with the devil.
What we discover in O’Connor’s stories and Martin Luther’s theology is that God’s grace is elusive because the human heart is resistant to it.
I hate to break it to you, but "are" is not an action verb. "Are" is a being verb.
This is the message of Lent. We are not called to sacrifice for Jesus in order to earn our salvation. Rather, we are called to remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for us.