Jeremiah’s prophetic call isn’t a one-off moment. Unique though it was, it wasn’t wholly exclusive.
Through baptism, absolution, and the Lord’s Supper, Christ meets you with his radical forgiveness which changes everything, even the self!
Despite evidences to the contrary, chaos does not reign. Jesus does.

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Thank God for heroes: they inspire us to be better, to help others, to live and work for the good of our race. And thank God for villains, too: they incarnate our shadow side, our nocturnal soul, the dragon within us that must incessantly have its throat slit on the altar of repentance.
It’s been my experience that All Saints’ Day, celebrated on November 1st and observed on the first Sunday following, gets overshadowed by the celebration of Reformation Day.
On this day, the church remembers all the saints who have gone before us.
The striking truth of this festival is not that the church remembers the saints who have gone before us, even though we rightly chime the bells and speak the names of those who in the past year have flown away (Ps. 90:10). The real joy of this day is that those who have departed are counted together with us as the church and we are counted together with them.
The Feast of the Reformation affords preachers a special opportunity to catechize on the doctrine of justification by faith. It is also a perfect week for us to read through Romans in full for our devotions. It is an opportunity to hear again those marvelous words of absolution and sins forgiven and to recognize a righteousness which is revealed apart from the Law (Rom. 3:21); our need for absolution must be very great.
So, in keeping with Mark’s focus on discipleship this Fall, your Reformation Sunday sermon on John 8 might reflect on what it means to be a disciple. As you proclaim the commands and promises of Christ, you might invite your hearers not only to believe his Word, but also to abide in it. To hear and mediate on his promises in the various ways he delivers them.
What postmoderns see in modernism is a misuse of power through the control of dominant narratives.
Let’s take a walk together. And as we do, I’ll tell you a mystery.
For all its stewing, regret ironically does not truly focus on the past. Often it is more concerned with the present and the future and how they would be if only we had done something differently.
We try believing in more abstract concepts: justice, happiness, and self-improvement, only to find that we can never truly grasp which standards should be accepted and which should be rejected.
The following is adapted from Called to Defend written by Valerie Locklair (1517 Publishing, 2017).
I am not going to give an apology for evolution as a scientific theory. Rather, I am wondering if the normal way of discussing evolutionary science within conservative Christianity has blinded us to certain fruitful uses of the theory.