We are invited to entrust everything to the one who accomplished what we could not: living and bleeding and dying and rising again, so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). To put it another way, when it comes to the kingdom of God, there’s no room for DIY’ers. Best leave it to the professionals.
We live in the “already” but “not yet”. Peace is already ours but not yet. The resurrection is already ours but not yet. Justice is already ours but not yet. Until then be comforted by the fact that you are reconciled in Christ on account of his life, death, and resurrection.
Luther neither removed the Apocrypha from the Bible nor discouraged its use. Rather, he received and preserved the ancient distinction inherited from the fathers: the Apocrypha is valuable, edifying, and worthy of reading, but it is not Holy Scripture and therefore cannot serve as the foundation of Christian doctrine.

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Since Adam, we are all illegal and undocumented aliens in God’s country.
What do Habakkuk and Israel have? Nothing but the word of God. Nothing but the promise of God. Nothing but God himself. They have the vision that Yahweh gives, the words of hope he utters. And that, amazingly, is enough.
Rather than calling me to pick burrs off my coat, God’s love strips me of my delusions and cuts to the heart of my disease.
But there is something far more serious and important: being reconciled to our Father in Heaven.
We don’t love little because we have little that requires forgiveness.
Nobody is going to crash Jesus’ wedding feast. Jesus is throwing the only party in town worth attending, and it’s going to be a celebration.
God has forgiven you. That is an objective fact. You can reject it, but it is nevertheless true.
Jesus’ forgiveness will not collapse. Jesus’ forgiveness will take us places our legs can’t take us.
The thing seems incredible, and I would not have believed it myself, nor have understood Paul’s words here, had I not witnessed it with my own eyes and experienced it.
But these good works aren’t done under compulsion. They’re done freely. They aren’t done so that God will love us. They’re done because He loves us.
For all its stewing, regret ironically does not truly focus on the past. Often it is more concerned with the present and the future and how they would be if only we had done something differently.
On a summer day in 2008, Thomas and Romayne McGinnis were presented with the highest honor that can be received in any branch of the United States military, that is, the Medal of Honor.