The Pharisee valued fasting and giving tithes, but could not find value in his fellow sinner.
God is not a tool in our hands. He does not exist to serve our goals, our metrics, or our platforms.
The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.

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If your faith is rooted in the gospel of Zion, in the good news of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection on your behalf, you are already a member of the “heavenly Jerusalem”
With the Spirit we will get lost in the world. We are on a new track.
God does not give us an undebatable answer to suffering. Instead, God suffers, too.
Strasbourg’s hymnals are especially relevant to American Lutherans because much of what we experience in our churches comes to us from Strasbourg.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Your God is Too Glorious: Finding God in the Most Unexpected Places by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2023).
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these early Lutheran hymns – and their physical availability in hymnals – in the piety of common people living in Lutheran towns and territories.
The Battle of Frankenhausen stands as a warning for what can happen when we abandon the Word God has given us and chase after some vision of our own imaginations.
The gospel is for sinners – both the tax collector and Pharisee, both in need of the Great Physician.
Elsewhere makes promises that can’t be kept, but God’s promises are secure, reliable, and certain.
This article is written by guest contributor, Christopher J. Richmann.
Like the serpent on the pole, God still puts real-life things up for us to look to for salvation.
Don’t get in the habit (or, if you already do it, get out of the habit) of saying, “I could never talk about these things the way my pastor does.”