When we consider our own end, it will not bring us into a final wrestling match with the messenger of God, but into the embrace of the Messiah of God.
What do such callings look like? They are ordinary and everyday.
This is the third in a series meant to let the Christian tradition speak for itself, the way it has carried Christians through long winters, confusion, and joy for centuries.

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He also took our own history and suffered all the agony and pain of our own lives.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 27 in “Pastor Craft: Essays and Sermons” written by John T. Pless (1517 Publishing, 2021). Now Available for Preorder
So what, if anything, makes us different from those who are waiting on the grassy knoll in Dallas, TX? Can we be any more sure of our belief in the resurrection?
There is no other transitionary event in human history that warrants three full months of focused attention and persistent acknowledgment than the incarnation of the Son of God.
If Jesus is indeed the same yesterday, today, and forever, everything his enfleshment brings is already assured: life, salvation, and forgiveness.
Is it possible to celebrate Thanksgiving every time we come together as God’s people as well?
That's how true faith talks. It doesn't talk about itself. It says "Thank you!" to the one who gives healing and salvation.
It is in your lows where Christ has hidden his highest high, eternal life itself.
Look the judge in the eye and pin your sin on Jesus, the divine judge’s son. Jesus knows you can’t do it, so he trades places with you and pits himself against God’s righteous demands.
The church is the only place God promises to lift us out of ourselves not in order to become more like God but so that we may finally be freed from our obsession with becoming little gods.
The Reformation was yet another era of history when God’s people were faced with the question that Jesus asked his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?”
Without the sacraments, God’s grace is simply an artifact behind a glass-case in a museum. We might be able to describe and even admire it, but we never get firsthand access to it.