This is an excerpt from Broken Bonds: A Novel of the Reformation by Amy Mantravadi (1517 Publishing, 2024), pgs. 12-14.
The Lord has an answer to your tears, your trouble, your weariness, your enemies, your grief, your shame, your sin.
No amount of ritual, sacrifice, devotion, or money could ever do what Jesus of Nazareth was sent to accomplish.

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Below is the Thinking Fellows Essential Reading List with contributions from each of the Thinking Fellows hosts.
Nature ends in stinging judgment from its Creator.
As both law and gospel are proclaimed, judgment and deliverance are miraculously pronounced over the hearer.
The one who delights in the law of the Lord learns to fear his own good works and trust God outside of them.
Free speech isn't dead yet, and when it comes to the proclamation of the gospel, it never will be.
It is your privilege—we may even say “right”—to call upon this Father and to call him Father.
God does not give us an undebatable answer to suffering. Instead, God suffers, too.
Do our petitions move God?
The issue is not the existence of so-called inner rings, but our desire and willingness to spend our lives in order to gain from an inner ring what is freely promised in Christ: hope, security, and identity.
We may not all be mass-murdering Nazis. But we all have the same root sin that causes the most egregious criminal activity on the face of the earth. We all have the desire to be our own God.
Everything in Scripture is God revealing himself to his people, you and me.
When we forget that we live by promise, that's when the danger tends to creep in. Because failing to embrace promise means we usually fall back into notions of luck, or even worse--into works.