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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We're ALL sinners in need of a Savior. We're all saints whose Savior forgives ALL our sin. We're all the same in relation to Christ crucified for the sin of the world.
Ultimately the Christian life isn't about progress, it's about promise--the Pilgrim's Promise.
He is no sweet and sappy, romanticized and Disneyfied, cartoonish Christ. He is ferocious, free, untamed, and heaven-bent on not leaving the battlefield until the war is won and he makes his enemies a footstool for his feet.
Faith is a gift from God. It’s not flashy or boast-worthy. It’s total dependency on the God who saves utter fools.
John Pless offers thoughts on preaching for your midweek Lent sermons.
God interrupts Peter, but not only to quiet him. He also directs Peter to listen to someone else.
Christianity has never been about getting people to clam up and look the part. It’s about Christ calling sinners to himself.
This article begins an eight-part series inspired by the Lenten themes of catechesis, prayer, and repentance found in the Lord’s Prayer as Luther taught it in his Small Catechism.
God’s will is not sparkly, flashy, exciting, extraordinary plans for your life—at least not in the Old Adam’s eyes. So, what is the will of God?
The implications were clear: Jesus’ death destroyed the things that distinguished people as educated or uneducated, rich or poor, free or enslaved, black or white, pious or godless.
Virtue, like all good things, can easily be weaponized. And not only can, but constantly is. Indeed, I would argue that, for churchgoing, rule-following, tradition-honoring, morality-applauding people, virtue often becomes the cancer that we deem a badge of honor.
His resurrection reveals that Jonah, and all of us, even the evilest people, are salvageable, even from suicide, in Jesus' death and resurrection.