This is an excerpt from Remembering Your Baptism: A Sinner Saint Devotional (1517 Publishing, 2025) by Kathy Morales, pgs 74-77.
“The Church exists to tell anyone and everyone who knocks on her door wondering what’s inside: Come and see” (pg. 58). Such reminders make The Church a worthwhile read.
The way of the cross is the actual way of victory. Jesus absorbs the worst of what humanity and even the devil can do to him, and he spurns the shame of it all.

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He reminds them how his love is truly marvelous and unconditional, but then, he looks them in the eyes, and says they ought to do better because of his love.
What is your fight club? Who is your Tyler Durden?
Who was this Jesus, who could do such things?
If you don’t believe Jesus Christ—that is, God in the man born of the Virgin Mary—died for the sins of the world, then you can’t evangelize.
When I first began to hear that the Bible’s good news was a whole lot less about me and a whole lot more about Christ, I just didn’t get it.
The table is full-laden; feast ye all sumptuously. The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away.
I don’t care why you left the ministry—moral failure, congregational politics, burnout, whatever—the Christ whom you proclaimed has not left you.
The Word of God wrecked the room. The wise and seasoned pastor along with the smart mouth vicar were all silenced in the fear and awe of a God who can seem so absent at times.
Over and over, generation after generation, sinners repeat the same mistake. "How is it possible that God can be a man," we ask.
Many Christians (including preachers) have succumbed to the idea that good preaching must be about practical living, and so most sermons are geared to scratch this pragmatic itch.
Imagine if Zacchaeus posted on Jerusalem's Facebook a selfie with Jesus. The top dog among the tax-gougers with Christ at his dinner table. Oh, the outrage! The puritanical zealots would have been tweeting and blogging about it for months.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Richter scale, our friends over at Wikipedia define it as a 1930s invention that "is a base-10 logarithmic scale, which defines magnitude as the logarithm of the ratio of the amplitude of the seismic waves to an arbitrary, minor amplitude."