The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.
One great thing about our post-denominational age is that it has opened up opportunities to make common cause with other Lutherans who, despite their differences and eccentricities, can agree on some of the most important things.
Pride builds identities that leave no room for grace.

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In an American evangelical landscape that emphasizes the importance of an individual’s personal decision to follow Jesus—as if that were the basis for God’s grace towards a man or woman—Lutherans and Reformed Christians insist that justification before God is based solely on Jesus’ work, two millennia ago.
Seeing, we do not see. Our eyes are busy deceiving us 24/7, like two liars sunk into our faces, calling black white and white black. To see God's work in our world, our eyes must retire and our ears labor overtime.
We have violated not that of which we are ignorant, but that of which we are fully aware. If you want proof, simply look at how well we attempt to cover up our evil deeds.
So the law was shattered, our icon was becoming urine and dung inside our guts, and lots of bloody corpses littered our camp. All this because we decided that it was okay for us to choose how we approach God.
For all our best efforts—political and evangelistic—our approach should always be through the Theology of the Cross. Our gardens are still bloody, but the blood of the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world will one day restore peace to our gardens.
In the public square, concerning public law, policy, and moral norms, debate is best carried out not with reference to that special revelation unique to a particular religion, but by appeal to that natural knowledge of the law possessed by all (even while recognizing human attempts, often successful, to suppress it).
Even putting to the side More’s purposes in the writing of Utopia, and Bolt’s in composing A Man for All Seasons, certain contexts pertaining to each are revealing.
Why, given all the things we wish God had told us, but didn’t, does he “waste our time” by stating the patently obvious? Was there, in Moses’ day, an outbreak of violence against the disabled?
Philip Melanchthon once said, “Those who disparage philosophy not only wage war against human nature, but they also severely injure the glory of the Gospel.”
Jesus is thus not only the fulfillment of the Scriptures of Israel; He is their fullness. He fills them with words, people, actions, and institutions that testify of Him.
If I am so bound up in the history of the first man, all the way back at the dawn of creation, how can I not also be bound up in the more recent history of my family?