This ancient “tale of two mothers” concerns far more than theological semantics—it is the difference between a God who sends and a God who comes.
This story points us from our unlikely heroes to the even more unlikely, and joyous, good news that Jesus’ birth for us was just as unlikely and unexpected.
Was Jesus ambitious or unambitious? We have to say that the answer is…yes.

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There is true help in the midst of our pain. Someone who suffered as we suffer, who embraced all our pain in his suffering and death on a cross.
This is our frontier religion: God is waiting to shower blessings upon us if only we will unlock those blessings with the right kind of works, and a sufficient quantity of the same.
Your faith is not dependent on whether or not you suffer well. Your faith is dependent on the fact that Christ did.
The gospel is the good news that in Christ we have been given the very righteousness of Christ himself. This means that everything God commands of us is given to us in Christ as a gift.
We confuse salvation and vocation in our quest to determine who is in control of our salvation.
What then does this sequence of stories teach us? It teaches us a pertinent lesson about the Christian life.
When we talk about bettering ourselves, we need to realize that a theology of the cross does not militate against this endeavor but that it places it squarely in the horizontal realm.
The real power of his hymn comes from the fact that Bonhoeffer does not offer a rosy picture of life or any of the tropes so typical of cheap piety that tell us that everything is always right, that things happen for a reason, and that we should try to stay positive.
The following is an excerpt from “A Year of Grace Volume 2” written by Bo Giertz and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2019).
“I forgive you,” must be said and it must be said often in a marriage.
Humility kills pride. So “humble yourself before the Lord,” as James writes (Jas 4:10). Kill your pride before it kills the things you love. Subdue it before it gets you into the kind of trouble that may even kill you. Conquer your pride before it defeats you. It’s that simple, but we all know it’s not that easy.
We want to be kind, gentle, and cheerful to others, but we’ve got to protect ourselves from getting hurt.