The Pharisee valued fasting and giving tithes, but could not find value in his fellow sinner.
God is not a tool in our hands. He does not exist to serve our goals, our metrics, or our platforms.
The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.

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Good reading is an ingredient for good preaching. Here are a few books –most of them relatively new- which you might want to put on your summer reading list.
Baptized believers are in Christ and of Christ. Once they were alienated from and hostile to God, now they have been reconciled through the work of Christ. This forgiveness is not unconditional. Christ is the condition and, indeed, He fulfills all the conditions.
Like Mary, they (with you) are at Jesus’ feet to learn and hear from the Lord of all Creation. It is a privileged place to be if there ever was one!
The Father, then, “has qualified you” through the work of Christ to share in the family inheritance. This inheritance is the Family of God itself and the family of the triune God Himself.
The communion service is a sermon in and of itself. The communion sermon is that which most expressly tells us of the sinless One who stands in the sinner’s stead.
The whole Reformation, and the reason for Lutheran theology at all, is to improve preaching.
According to the Law, everyone will be judged by their own deeds, on his own work. So, before the judgment of God we only have our own works to boast in and not our neighbor’s. But the Gospel shows us a wonderful exception.
I love apologetics, the art, and science of defending the Christian faith. I love talking about all the philosophical arguments for the existence of God with my skeptical friends.
[This text] describes a journey to a foreign region where Jesus engages in a confrontational conversation with a legion of demons, performs a violent and scandalous exorcism, and leaves behind a community gripped by terror. Apparently, the only thing more frightening than a naked, graveyard-dwelling demoniac is this visitor from Nazareth who reigns over everything.
The 'church' is neither your mega-complex nor is it you alone with your own private devotions.
My family fills a row of chairs in the sanctuary of our church. I always feel bad for the people who sit around my noisy family. Our pastor loves children and has told me once he struggles to preach on the Sundays when they are all whisked off to Children's Church after the music once a month because the sanctuary is too quiet.
The words “for you” are what deliver burdened hearts into the glorious light of freedom, for they deliver the precious, life-giving cargo of God’s relentless grace to each of us.