Sin is a heavy thing to bear. Its jacket is shame, its medals are guilt.

Sometimes in hanging on to our useless guilt, we are idolaters. We believe our sin or conscience is more powerful than our God.

To say that whoever loves has been born of God is also to say that those who are born of God are recipients of love. They do not have God because they love but because they are loved.

God invites you to confess the skeletons in your closet so that he might bury them in the grave for good.

The primary point of Joseph’s life (and every story in Scripture) is to point us to Christ. To tell us something about what God is like and how He interacts with His Creation.

It may seem like a radical statement, but in Christ Jesus, there’s nothing wrong with you.

Shame is shameful. That may seem obvious but ponder this observation from the authors of Scenes of Shame: “Shame, indeed, covers shame itself—it is shameful to express shame.”

It’s by no means an ivory-tower theological question. It’s as real as the weight we’ve lost from the stress of our divorce. As real as the bottle of antidepressants on our nightstand. We believe in him. We love him. But every voice inside us and every shred of evidence outside us points to his abandonment of us in our hour of deepest need.

This is the sixth installment in our special series on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation. Translation of Theses 11 and 12 by Caleb Keith.

In the tiny Bible-belt town where I grew up, tragedy brought people together.

To be sure, the devil has an incredible arsenal of assaults with which he can waylay believers into ineptitude and ineffectiveness.

The commonly accepted wisdom is that we feel guilt over what we’ve done and we experience shame over who we are. If guilt is the blemish on our face then shame is the cancer in our heart. It’s deeper, harder to dig out.