Faith, for Peter, is not suspended in religious abstraction. It is tied to something that happened in time and space.
Baptism does not promise us chocolates or flowers, but something far greater: life in Christ.
The Promised Land invites us to laugh at how relatable it is to be exhausted and exasperated by all the people, and the egos and opinions they bring with them, that come with living.

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Even if the numbers are bad, the news about Jesus crucified for sinners and raised to new life hasn’t become any less good.
There is a revival, no less real and even more definitive, taking place in every church, every weekend, where God’s people gather around his gifts.
We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
Hidden beneath the sinner is a glorious saint. Jesus has declared it to be so in your baptism.
Authentic proclamation, then, is the love of Christ for our souls, which we have seen and experienced through the under-shepherd’s pastoral care put into the words of Christ Himself.
The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.
The sermon takes place in the context of a multi-facetted set of relationships experienced through the weeks and months of being together in congregation and community. Those relationships shape the credibility of the preacher in the pulpit. 
The word which justifies by bringing faith in baptism is the same powerful word that recreates, regenerates, and re-births a human being in baptism.
Toy Story is indeed a Christmas story.
It makes perfect sense that the day honoring Jesus' birth would be observed in a decidedly less than refined manner.
Despite our best efforts to avoid him, King Jesus remains very much unavoidable.
To trust in the Lord, the Messiah, the Deliverer, is our salvation and our only hope. Yet he does not trust us to have this “trust” on our own or of our own will.