People everywhere, every day, feel God’s wrath—and not as merely an afterlife threat but as a present reality.
Faith, for Peter, is not suspended in religious abstraction. It is tied to something that happened in time and space.
Baptism does not promise us chocolates or flowers, but something far greater: life in Christ.

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The Christian must always remember that personal piety and liturgical uniformity are by no means the marks of true religion.
We don't associate the word "regret" with anything "good," but God does.
It is Jesus himself who is the ladder by which sinners get to God, not by them climbing up but by God climbing down.
In Christ, this world’s never-children are his always-children, because he isn’t a God of death, after all.
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”
This is an excerpt from “Confession and Absolution” by John T. Pless in Common Places in Theology: A Curated Collection of Essays from Lutheran Quarterly, edited by Mark Mattes, (1517 Publishing 2023).
Success is emphatically not your primary identity.
We know we are made for something great. We humans were created in God’s image and restored through Christ in his perfect image.
We can do nothing to warrant entry into the kingdom of God nor are we getting in if we think a seat at God’s table is something to which we are entitled.
The cross not only stands as the measure of our hatred of God but also as the measure of God’s love for us.
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 gospel is for sinners – both the tax collector and Pharisee, both in need of the Great Physician.