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.
The confessors at Augsburg remind us that every generation of Christians is called to bear witness to the gospel amid the challenges and pressures of its own age. As they confessed Christ before emperors and kingdoms, so the Church continues to confess Him before the world today.
When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.

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When joined with a good Reformation theology of vocation and the freedom of a Christian, Fujimura’s vision for culture care is something all Christians can embrace, regardless of whether they are artists in the formal sense.
There is a bit of Narcissus in all of us. We are all lost within ourselves.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Clothed with Christ written byBrian W. Thomas (1517 Publishing, 2024). Now available for preorder.
In the Bible, we meet the God who also does not prance around naked as a jaybird.
Jesus took the poison of sin and drank the cup of wrath on our behalf to gain favor and righteousness for us.
What the gospel does is take people who were enemies of God and transform them into lovers of God
The one who delights in the law of the Lord learns to fear his own good works and trust God outside of them.
The good news for Jacob is that God humbled himself so that he could lose a wrestling match to a man with a dislocated hip so that he could give him a new name.
It is Jesus himself who is the ladder by which sinners get to God, not by them climbing up but by God climbing down.
Success is emphatically not your primary identity.
Dispel some of that darkness bottled up inside you, with the grace first shared to us by Christ that is now ours to share with those around us.
Like Jacob, sinners approach the Heavenly Father wearing the clothes of their older brother, Jesus.