While they speak on various aspects of the preaching task, these essays share a unity in their authors’ commitment to the fact that the preaching of Jesus Christ is not simply motivational, informational, or inspirational; it is the delivery of God’s promise into the ears of those who if left to themselves are deaf to the Creator’s voice.

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

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.

With every bone in our bodies, we declare war on grace. We declare war on the gift.

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!

Only in Christ has God taken upon himself the worst that could ever happen between God and man: he has allowed himself to be rejected.

Our only claim to fame is that we have been claimed by a God who is consistently drawn to losers!

What is it to perform the Word? Is it to speak about it, to retell it, to illustrate it, to enlighten it? What?

Forde’s work testifies to the liveliness and vitality of confessional Lutheranism, and its promise for the continuing need to preach Christ crucified in this, and every, age until the Lord’s return.