We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
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.

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“The lack of assurance of one’s standing before God causes a person to do anything to make things right in a vain attempt to gain eternal certitude. ”
To be sure, the devil has an incredible arsenal of assaults with which he can waylay believers into ineptitude and ineffectiveness.
The following is an excerpt from Martin Luther’s Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1535), translated by Haroldo Camacho (1517 Publishing, 2018).
When we imagine we’re living an evil-shunning, virtue-practicing, morally superior Christian life, the problem is not that our halos are too small, but that our heads are too big.
The commonly accepted wisdom is that we feel guilt over what we’ve done and we experience shame over who we are. If guilt is the blemish on our face then shame is the cancer in our heart. It’s deeper, harder to dig out.
The reason the U.S. is blessed by God is that we are essentially a “good” nation. And this is the root of Bob’s problem (and that of all civil religion).
No worry, no fear. Nothing she can do can separate her from the love of Christ!
All the verbs of our salvation are passive. God calls and gathers people to him through his Gospel.
My Grandmother recently lost a long battle with cancer. Her name was Joy, and a name has never been more fitting.
We need a God who can heal us of true guilt and false guilt. We need a Christ who not only removes the shame we feel for what we’ve done, but who washes away the shame that others have smeared upon us.
Hope doesn’t bury its head in the sand but stares, open-eyed, into the truth of this life’s worst horror, and says, “I know the God who went through something even worse, and came out on top.
As I was reading Romans 7 today, I was reminded of a pivotal scene in one of my favorite movies, As Good As it Gets.