1. Human history, our history, is the story of two Adams with two very different encounters with the devil.
  2. What we discover in O’Connor’s stories and Martin Luther’s theology is that God’s grace is elusive because the human heart is resistant to it.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Ash Wednesday's purpose is not to motivate our resolve to redouble our efforts to do better.
  7. We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
  8. Predestination, Jim knew, is no longer a frightening doctrine of mystery when you understand that God makes his choice about you in the simple word of God, given from one sinner to another.
  9. Even as he was dying, the heart of God poured itself out for the sake of sinners.
  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. This is an excerpt from “The Alien and the Proper: Luther's Two-Fold Righteousness in Controversy, Ministry, and Citizenship,” edited by Robert Kolb (1517 Publishing, 2023). Now available for purchase.