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. Past, present, and future are tied together in Christ.
  3. We don't make Church "happen." Only Christ can do so. It's his happening.
  4. Even if the numbers are bad, the news about Jesus crucified for sinners and raised to new life hasn’t become any less good.
  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. Zephaniah has given us something more visceral to help us understand the love of God: the sound of salvation.
  7. Rightly distinguishing between law and gospel, as Paul helps us see in 2 Corinthians 3, is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
  8. Even as he was dying, the heart of God poured itself out for the sake of sinners.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. The law had to have its way with the expert to bring him around (and back) to Abraham's response.
  12. The usual acclamation when one becomes King is: “Long live the King!” But this King of kings, this son of David, has come to die.