This is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of Fear Not: How the Gospel Disrupts Our Deepest Anxieties by Luke Kjolhaug (1517 Publishing, 2026).
We draw near because Christ our Mediator has gone where we never could, and he has brought us with him.
The Israelite God was different from all the other gods, thus, the worship of Yahweh differed from that of all other gods.

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The gospel promise is that God in Christ knows exactly what your temptations are and still bids you find protection from them in him.
When Luther's barber, Peter Beskendorf, asked him how to pray, Luther wrote him an open letter that has become a classic expression of the "when, how, and what" of prayer. It is as instructive today as when it was first penned it in 1535.
The devil is to be taken seriously, but we should also not give him more credit or more power than he has after being defanged by Christ’s resurrection.
Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. But if you pause the story...then it is not just about Jesus raising Lazarus.
The people should find their lives in your sermon, and no one’s life is unaffected by the coronavirus right now. It is the very fact that I can make such a blanket statement, free of all caveats, which makes it so necessary for us to preach on it.
The whole world's sin, the crushing horror of death's power, and even hell itself were unleashed on that hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus was executed.
In the vortex of uncertainty and upheaval, what’s the best thing we can do? Seize the ordinary.
Can we fully experience the joy of the Festival of the Resurrection if we do not seriously stare boldly into the sad state of our own faithlessness to Him who promises to be faithful even when we are not?
When the story begins in creation and ends in restoration, all the moments in between are filled with the working of God.
Paul says that the power of sin is the law. The more clearly we understand the law, the more sin oppresses and stings us.
What I have come to see is that while anyone can make a conscious decision to walk away from God or deny him, a person can’t accidentally lose his or her salvation.
Ashes and dust do not need the services of spiritual EMTs; we need a Second Adam from whom we regain life itself.