A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.
For Bonhoeffer, Christ crucified, and the cross of the Christian life were not of peripheral importance, but foundational.
While we often talk about our growth, our progress, and what we are doing for the kingdom of God, the reality is that any goodness in a Christian does not originate in us.

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We may not all be mass-murdering Nazis. But we all have the same root sin that causes the most egregious criminal activity on the face of the earth. We all have the desire to be our own God.
Everything in Scripture is God revealing himself to his people, you and me.
The Parable of the Lost Sheep bursts through the confines of convention and demands that we embrace the messiness of life and the unpredictable ways in which God's grace and forgiveness operates.
We live for the most part, on the strength of our moral fiber, under the law, by our zeal for God and all that which tickles our proud fancy.
When we forget that we live by promise, that's when the danger tends to creep in. Because failing to embrace promise means we usually fall back into notions of luck, or even worse--into works.
What might Christians of the Reformation tradition think of claims like these about the nature of salvation?
This is an excerpt from part two of “On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service” by Mike Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023).
What if sin was truly removed and what if the one who took it from us had the power to conquer it’s curse and spit in the face of death?
It’s scary to share my struggle and to show that I have cracks because once I’ve shown my cards, I open myself up for judgment.
We can’t predict the harvest. We can only sow.
Ash Wednesday's purpose is not to motivate our resolve to redouble our efforts to do better.
To believe God is love and thus loves you is a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit.