Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.
God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.

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Sometimes the old story is the one we need to hear again and again.
Jesus satisfies, fills, and saves because he is the Son of God, who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns forever.
You cannot sever the saint from the sinner. Christians remain both simultaneously.
Jesus is very difficult to bring down. That’s the power of it.
In grace, God chooses to love his people.
This is an excerpt from Ditching the Checklist: Assurance of Salvation for Evangelicals (and Other Sinners) by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 5-7.
In the liturgy, Christ is present, self-giving, and ever-addressing his people.
The wrong god means love remains frail, fickle, or a fiction. The right God means love is the most reliable thing in all the world.
The story being told in the film is not Bonhoeffer’s story. It’s not the Confession Church’s story. Nor is it the story of the German resistance against Hitler. It is a completely fictional story of Hollywood.
There is no one — not now, not ever — who cannot be included in the family of God through the efficacy of Christ’s saving power.
Jesus, the true Bridegroom, erases that mistake by his own compassionate, saving act. Isn’t this also a picture of the gospel?
"When God has his say, have confidence that his Word and sacraments bestow precisely what he says."