Jesus reveals to them again who He is. And that life can only be given when we feed on Christ.

If you interpret James, as most do, as an encouragement toward proving your faith by your works and then say it is your "favorite" then you are proclaiming that your favorite thing about the Christian faith is the practical outworking, the proving your faith by your works.

This is an excerpt from “The Alien and the Proper: Luther's Two-Fold Righteousness in Controversy, Ministry, and Citizenship,” edited by Robert Kolb (1517 Publishing, 2023). Now available for purchase.

This is an excerpt from “The Alien and the Proper: Luther's Two-Fold Righteousness in Controversy, Ministry, and Citizenship,” edited by Robert Kolb (1517 Publishing, 2023).

The good news is that with our God there is always more: more than we deserve, dare, ask, or expect, more than we can see, hear, feel, or think.

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.”

We subject ourselves to the governing authorities for the sake of our neighbor, that they might be protected from our sinful nature that seeks our advantage over theirs (and vice versa)

We vote because we are citizens, and it is our duty. We serve our neighbors in love because it is our Christian calling.

Justice and love are united in God, and we see this most clearly in Jesus on the cross. There, both God's hatred toward sin and compassion for the world come together.

The point is that the whole lot was wicked. And so were the Galatian Christians. And so are we.

We confuse salvation and vocation in our quest to determine who is in control of our salvation.

When we talk about bettering ourselves, we need to realize that a theology of the cross does not militate against this endeavor but that it places it squarely in the horizontal realm.