When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.
The life we are trying to manage, improve, and secure is not something to be mastered. It is something to be surrendered. And this is where everything changes. Because in Christ, the approval we are seeking has already been spoken.
It is within this charged atmosphere that Luther’s writings take on their full significance. His responses to the Turkish threat were not merely reactions to military events; they were rooted in a deep theological reflection on the nature of God’s rule over the world, the responsibilities of Christian rulers, and the role of the Church in times of crisis.

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How can we best talk about the Gospel with an Old Testament accent? Chad Bird provides us with a helpful "map" that highlights Egypt, the Red Sea, and Jerusalem. These three places represent the ways in which God graciously redeems, delivers, and sanctifies us. This brief essay was delivered at the 1517 Regional Conference in Bentonville, Arkansas, on April 17, 2021.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted written by Gretchen Ronnevik (1517 Publishing, 2021). Now available for preorder.
God has a strange delivery system, the foolish preaching of the cross and foolish preachers for Christ’s sake delivering it.
What kind of shepherd does God provide? The answer, of course, starts and ends with Christ.
The biblical shepherd leads his sheep. He provides for their needs. He protects them from enemies, and he does not leave his sheep unattended.
Resurrection life is not something cast into the future. The future is now.
He continues to gather other sheep in, and He does it through the selfless serving and the gracious speaking of His people.
The result of this day’s proceedings, in Luther’s mind, was likely to be a painful death at the stake.
Jesus rejects what we believe is most necessary and instead points us to his pain, suffering, death, and self-sacrifice.
Forde’s work testifies to the liveliness and vitality of confessional Lutheranism, and its promise for the continuing need to preach Christ crucified in this, and every, age until the Lord’s return.
"Vocation: The Setting for Human Flourishing" by Michael Berg is now available for purchase
Jesus’s touch of this leper is the touchstone of the gospel itself. It’s a living parable of his entire ministry.