The greatest obstacle to friendship in middle age isn't that nobody wants friends. It's that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. But here's the good news: Christ has already gone first for you. And because He has, you are free to go first for someone else.
Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything under heaven. But God has also placed eternity in our hearts, and that makes us strange creatures: able to rejoice in this life yet always aching for a life that only Christ can give.
What does it take to draw near to God? It takes a perfect priest, a finished work, and a broken body to open the way. In short, it takes everything, which is exactly what Christ has given for you.

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Americans love the vicarious sense of pride they get from the odds-defying underdog myth.
The danger was not necessarily inside the city. Nor was it from an obvious source. Outside the walls of Thyatira, lay a small shrine of white stone.
God is used to working with colorful figures. One of the most colorful in the Bible is Balaam. Hailing from Mesopotamia, Balaam was what we might call a shaman or a soothsayer.
Holding to Jesus’ teaching while denying His divinity presents a host of complications that make it difficult to take one and leave the other.
Your eternal salvation isn’t dependent on performance or effort. Well, not your performance anyway...
All the weight of our sin is lifted by Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the whole world, past, present, and future.
The following is an excerpt from Law and Gospel in Action written by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2019).
Like the Pharisees, as well-meaning, contemporary Christians we too can often add fences to God’s Law.
When we say “forgiveness,” we mean, “Jesus.” When we say, “righteousness,” we mean, “Jesus.”
To be human is to be preoccupied with averting pain and despair. But despair gets a bad rap.
In honor of the anniversary of Philip Melanchthon’s Birthday, the following is an excerpt from Meeting Melanchthon written by Scott Keith (1517 Publishing, 2017).
The history of the early Reformation in the New World is both a tale of pirates and the battle of catechisms.