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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This is the first installment in our series, From Eden to Easter: Life and Death in the Garden. Each day throughout Holy Week, we will take a special look at the gardens and wildernesses of Scripture, and in particular, these scenes' connections to Christ's redemption won for us on the cross.
Every earthly kingdom meets its end. All empires crumble and fall. But from the beginning, the kingdom of God, which Christ would rule, was said to be eternal.
No matter how stringent one's "regulations" — "Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch" (Col. 2:21) — the sinful nature that resides in everyone's heart is untamable by self-effort alone.
God’s people get the warm feast of victory, while God’s meal is prepared cold.
Sometimes the old story is the one we need to hear again and again.
Jesus satisfies, fills, and saves because he is the Son of God, who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns forever.
The great lie of addiction is that suffering must be fled, must be numbed, must be drowned out by any means necessary.
You cannot sever the saint from the sinner. Christians remain both simultaneously.
In the upside-down wisdom of God, the place of the cross becomes the place of life, absolution, and triumph.
In grace, God chooses to love his people.
The wrong god means love remains frail, fickle, or a fiction. The right God means love is the most reliable thing in all the world.
It's a new year, and you are still the same you: a sinner who is simultaneously perfect in every way because Christ declares it to be so.