This is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of Fear Not: How the Gospel Disrupts Our Deepest Anxieties by Luke Kjolhaug (1517 Publishing, 2026).
We draw near because Christ our Mediator has gone where we never could, and he has brought us with him.
The Israelite God was different from all the other gods, thus, the worship of Yahweh differed from that of all other gods.

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It’s time to call bull on a theology the dominates Christianity.
We want to know how God rules this world, how he is present in all things, how he exerts his control over the course of world events. We want to know why some get cancer and some don’t, why terrible things happen to the best of people, why volcanoes erupt and hurricanes strike and fires consume.
When we explain away God’s Word, we jettison the reality of our ominous diagnosis in the “Thou shall/shall nots” of the law, and with it the sweet cure in the, “This is My body/blood” of the Gospel.
We can leave all the stuff of life behind, because our great treasure God flaunts before the world on Calvary.
The Christian faith makes a bold claim: We are the world's problem, but we are not the world's solution.
We treat the Scriptures as if they’re our literary property to toy with as we please.
We are continuing our summer series on a theology of worship through the lens of language. Before moving forward, let me highlight a few points by way of review.
Being a Christian is hard because it’s easy.
The time constrained authoring of the Augustana caused great angst, for the part of Melanchthon that was never satisfied with his own literary output.
Like any language, the liturgy has syntax—a structure that provides order and intelligibly communicates meaning through all that is said.
Either one of those verses alone is scary; but both of them together are terrifying!
As the story unfolds we see Luther’s Heidelberg theses on display, even before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell.