Dear hearers of the word of God, you are finished. You cannot be the same now. All that is ended, over.

This sermon was originally given at Luther Seminary chapel on May 20, 1986.

Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.

It is terribly easy to set up our theology as a buffer against the real coming of the Lord and its consequences.

Even though All Saints is a day for remembering the dead, it is not a day of mourning.

It seems to me that our greatest task is not that of seeking skills and methods whereby we can inject power into the gospel, but simply to beware lest we obscure the power that the gospel is

Good, we tend to think, is the absence of evil. But this reversal of the formula can only have disastrous consequences.

If you are going to lose your life for the gospel’s sake, you must begin by hearing it.

It’s God’s power that we are dealing with here that is made perfect in weakness, not ours. God’s power is made perfect in the weakness of the cross.

We worry about the fact our days are as grass – so we try to scratch out a place for ourselves, to make a permanent, lasting place, to climb to higher places and succeed, more often than not, only to hurt each other in the process.

God has found a way to be God even for the likes of us. He has found a way to save sinners.

You can die now, you can let go, and because that is true, you can begin to live!