This is the third installment in the 1517 articles series, “What Makes a Saint?”
The Church speaks not with the cleverness of men, but with the breath of God.
I always imagined dying a faithful death for Christ would mean burning at the stake. Now, I suspect it will mean dying in my bed of natural causes.

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A truly Christian work is it that we descend and get mixed up in the mire of the sinner, taking his sin upon ourselves and floundering out of it with him, not acting otherwise than as if his sin were our own.
Sometimes I think I've gone through the whole forgiveness process, but forgiveness for me often feels like I'm weeding my garden. I forgive and another offense pops up.
Christ presents to us such liberty, so that we as Christians according to our faith may tolerate no other master, but only hold that we are baptized and called unto Christ, and through him have become justified and sanctified.
If the world could have been saved by bookkeeping, it would have been saved by Moses, not Jesus. The law was just fine.
The enemy comes with his wounding, haunting words, and I stand behind my advocate Christ the Lord. He gives me more words, better words, truer words.
We are free to be in the world, but not of the world. We are freed to stop treating the pursuit of pleasure as an escape from pain, suffering, and death.
Today, by faith, we live free from condemnation, free from the fear of death, free from all slander the devil could whisper and scatter about us. In Him we have a new family, the family of the forgiven.
In the end, my only hope is that Jesus is always the initiator of mercy. He pursues me, even when I am unfaithful.
I love the liturgy of my church, and ache for its full return. When all the world is changing, and everything is disrupted, what comes to mind is what is unchanging: the grace of God.
The throne of grace is always available to us. For the Christian, it isn’t and never will be a throne of judgment. All of the judgment for all of our sin was laid upon our perfect Savior.
Jesus does not give as the world gives. With Jesus, everything is guaranteed and has been finished from the start.
The primary point of Joseph’s life (and every story in Scripture) is to point us to Christ. To tell us something about what God is like and how He interacts with His Creation.