The confessors at Augsburg remind us that every generation of Christians is called to bear witness to the gospel amid the challenges and pressures of its own age. As they confessed Christ before emperors and kingdoms, so the Church continues to confess Him before the world today.
When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.
The life we are trying to manage, improve, and secure is not something to be mastered. It is something to be surrendered. And this is where everything changes. Because in Christ, the approval we are seeking has already been spoken.

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Devoid of the gospel of Jesus’s death and resurrection, sufferers are left to frantically run the halls of self-salvation, turning this way and that but never getting anywhere.
Uzziah was showing the most dangerous kind of pride – a pride wrapped up under the guise of religious service.
Lent isn't simply a season. It's the Christian life in microcosm.
Apart from the confession that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God who suffered and died for the forgiveness of sins and rose again to justify the ungodly, there is no Christian faith.
This is the first installment in our Lenten series, Through the Tombs of the Kings, where Steve Kruschel explores God’s faithfulness to Judah’s kings—and to us—through life, death, and the burial of his Son.
The cross traced in ashes isn’t a badge of honor or a mark of our works. It’s a reminder of Christ’s work.
Repentance is not limited to a season.
God is a judge, but unlike you, God is just!
Despite the mathematical incongruity, the church confesses that Christ is one hundred percent human and one hundred percent divine.
In the upside-down wisdom of God, the place of the cross becomes the place of life, absolution, and triumph.
In grace, God chooses to love his people.
This is an excerpt from Ditching the Checklist: Assurance of Salvation for Evangelicals (and Other Sinners) by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 5-7.