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.
The life we are trying to manage, improve, and secure is not something to be mastered. It is something to be surrendered. And this is where everything changes. Because in Christ, the approval we are seeking has already been spoken.

All Articles

Have you ever read scripture and been caught by a crippling wave of guilt, shame and fear? Have you sat with your Bible open in front of you and thought, “Well, if this is the case, I might as well pack it in right now, because there’s no hope for me!”
To be justified means to be declared righteous in the forgiveness that is ours in the crucified Christ. It is a done deal, and by faith we have it all.
We are a sinning church with a preaching problem.
I love stories with happy endings! My husband makes fun of me, but he has been known to graciously sit through a variety of schmaltzy chick flicks because he knows how I feel.
Left to ourselves, we are like Adam and Eve; we sew together fig leaves of self-righteousness and hunker down behind trees of flimsy excuses to hide in vain from a judgment we deserve.
As Luther’s efforts at reform began to build, so did the vacancies in monasteries and convents across Europe as monks and nuns motivated by evangelical teaching left their orders for other vocations and opportunities, including marriage.
We are fond of attaching our own résumés to our spoken or unspoken prayers. “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like other men, such as that lying, pathetic, husband named Abraham.”
If there was a proclamation of grace, it was an afterthought, given in the sense of “just in case anyone needs this.”
Here’s what lurks beneath this seemingly righteous behavior: they wanted to make a name for themselves, these tower-builders.
(This article first appeared in Modern Reformation and is posted here with permission.)
Good people like fist-pounding on the pulpit about the bad things that bad people do in this bad world of ours. It makes them feel better about themselves.
Ultimately, the lie we have believed is that God is like we are. He is not. Thank God that he is not. He is the Lord who reverses all our expectations.