John Bombaro

Hymns were a means by which people were brought into direct contact with the Gospel that brought justifying faith. Set to music, they could readily memorize it, take it home with them, and rehearse its messages around the hearth and at work.

It’s the notion of mercy that leads us to the atonement, and it is the atonement that provides a foundational basis for the justification of sinners.

St. Paul extends to us the call to arms. In particular, there is one weapon which is effective against so elusive an enemy. The weapon is prayer.

The one who embodies the dove, that is, the Holy Spirit will be mounted upon the staff of Calvary.

Jesus is the ultimate, endearing, and definitive answer to the world’s problems, not any political party or ideology, nor any religion or the combination of the two.

Being the baptized just may be the last, great resistance.

As the Spirit does His work, He produces new ways of living for individuals, households (like Philemon’s) and communities, that is, the Church.

Love for the brethren should be the hallmark of the Christian Church. It is basic to our witness to an unbelieving world .

We need to know the Christian faith—such as it does not capitulate with Zeitgeist—always comes with a price of being maligned, persecuted, marginalized, blamed, you name it.

The battle is not so much recognizing sins as admitting them. It is also not so much confessing them as repenting them or laying them aside. But we can do it. Looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith...

To base and entrust your life on what can be seen in this world is to commit oneself to unreality. The reality of things, indeed, the way, the truth and the life of the world is in what is not readily seen: Christ as Lord.

The pastor, then, possesses the prerogative of calling the children to himself, in the stead of Christ and after the manner of Christ, to particularly bless them with the Word.

Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.

Preaching the Word made flesh liberates the imagination from this world’s false and crippling vision of reality, and once again brings the imagination into an encounter with the one and only true and living God through Immanuel: “God with us.”

In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.

According to the Law, everyone will be judged by their own deeds, on his own work. So, before the judgment of God we only have our own works to boast in and not our neighbor’s. But the Gospel shows us a wonderful exception.

If Easter is about Jesus as the prototype of the new creation, then the Ascension is about His enthronement as the One who rules forevermore on Earth as it is in Heaven.

In the Church, the cry is, “He loves,” and it is that message which transforms our worldviews from taking to giving, from radical individualism to trans-demographic inclusivism, from selfishness to selflessness, from “tolerate my rights” to “loving rightly together.”

Jerusalem, temple, and king, all three bespoke of Yahweh’s kingship, as well as of His Kingdom and presence on earth and all the blessings bound up with it.

Preaching the inseparability of Jesus and Jerusalem is to proclaim God’s Messiah and the fulfillment of the Scriptures.

Perhaps this year we shall see Lent reaching more toward Easter and tethered to the resurrection then the economy-car style tradition which simply terminates in Good Friday.

Lent is a gift to the Church from the Church. It belongs to all Christians who desire to be conformed to the likeness of our Lord.

If we think God’s power, love and beauty are reserved merely for the glories of Transfiguration, then we have not understood the Father; we have not understood divine revelation.

Justification and regeneration are, therefore, necessarily connected and have profound implications upon the craft of preaching.

Christ is present in the pure preaching of the gospel. And if Christ is present, then we have entered into the domain of the sacraments.