1. This is an excerpt from the prologue of “On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service” by Mike Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023).
  2. My fear of this coming darkness only lasts a moment.
  3. We don't make Church "happen." Only Christ can do so. It's his happening.
  4. The hardest thing you and I will ever be called to do is to believe that it is done already, that it really and truly is finished.
  5. When I finished this book, I loved the Bible, and the Bible’s author, even more. And I can’t imagine a better endorsement than that.
  6. Even if the numbers are bad, the news about Jesus crucified for sinners and raised to new life hasn’t become any less good.
  7. There is a revival, no less real and even more definitive, taking place in every church, every weekend, where God’s people gather around his gifts.
  8. The earliest followers of God sang their faith, which is no different today as we sing of the hope we have in Jesus.
  9. We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
  10. Christ our Word, as with a two-edged sword, burst the devil's belly.
  11. I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.
  12. The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.