Robert Kolb

Trusting in Christ’s promise of new life and deliverance pours gratitude into the way we think and the way we experience life.

God makes all things new. He refashions us from those turned in upon ourselves, turned to idols of our own choice and making, to experience the freedom He gives by pronouncing us His righteous children.

As we close out an old year, Saint Silvester can remind us God is the Lord of history and He has used and is using even people whose lives sink largely or totally into obscurity to keep the confession of our faith in Jesus Christ alive.

Imperatives are good for many things. Luther said the Law is good, but precisely because it is good, it has become poison and death to the bad. The Law does not give life but evaluates it, and we encounter day in and day out its negative evaluation of us.

As long as our illusions of control over storms and germs persist to govern our thinking, we will never be able to take the saving work of Christ as seriously we ought.

The Church's hymns help us see our own world from another—and perhaps not so different—vantage point that illuminates the impact of the work of Christ and the general providing and protecting activity of our Creator in our lives.

God does not take us out of a world of evils of various kinds, but He does stand beside us and accompany us, as a shepherd accompanies his sheep, through valleys of shadows of all kinds.

God’s goal in all this is that His call to repentance impacts our lives by turning us to find peace and joy in Christ.

New normals are always sneaking up on us. Preachers ignore them to their peril and the peril of our hearers.

Twenty-first century North American believers face challenges unique in the history of God’s people, for we have an abundance of the material gifts of God unparalleled in human history.

Those who occupy the pulpit will always be sensitive to various kinds of reactions, expected and unexpected, and eager for the feedback that helps evaluate whether the words from the pulpit have achieved their intended goal.

The gift of new life through His death and resurrection, creates Christ’s children, all of whom are being sent with beautiful feet and beautiful tongue and lips to serve as the Lord’s hitmen and midwives.

The Easter season is designed to cultivate our resurrection thinking throughout the year. When God looks at us each day, He sees us through the lens of Christ’s resurrection. We should look at our lives the same way.

The gospel of Jesus’ coming out of death and the tomb alive so that we might be restored to our identity as God’s children establishes the most enduring reality there is.

The devil is to be taken seriously, but we should also not give him more credit or more power than he has after being defanged by Christ’s resurrection.

Can we fully experience the joy of the Festival of the Resurrection if we do not seriously stare boldly into the sad state of our own faithlessness to Him who promises to be faithful even when we are not?

God is placing us in new situations. His unchanging and utterly reliable Word provides our only anchor.

God has placed preachers of His Word in the frontlines of His combat against Satan and all his minions that is fought out on the battlefields of the individual lives of believers.

Above all, pastors must aim their preaching at the people God has placed in the care of the pastor rather than airing pious ideas that did not speak to their situations.

Our words of proclamation from the pulpit not only bring repentance and comfort, enacting in our hearers an exchange of sinful identity for the identity of God’s child, but also the motivation and fuel for loving others.

Trust may risk, but trust produces a sense of assurance letting us rest easy and enjoy peace while it drives us to ventures which may seem dangerous but are possible to do because trust defies the dangers.

Forgiveness is ours, Luther continually proclaimed, because Christ has put His claim on our sins and taken them as His own to the Cross and into His tomb.

Reconciliation with God affirms the worth of our persons, and it banishes the inhibitions and fears, as well as the resentments and desire for revenge, which create gulches between us and those around us.

Jesus purifies His own and ends their identification as unfit to appear in His presence or in front of other people as the person we identify as our true self.

This restoration to righteousness that results in our freedom for loving and supporting other people whom God places within our reach takes place, Luther believed, through Christ’s liberating victory over Satan.