No matter how many times we hear this good news, it never stops being good news.
Our faith is precisely where Paul puts it, namely, in the blood of Christ.
Just as trick-or-treaters arrive at doorsteps as beggars, we come to the Lord’s table with nothing to offer but our sin and need for forgiveness.

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Questions of our purpose and significance as a church abound with fewer and fewer people in the pews.
The only one rightful heir of the kingdom of God, inherits from us, our cross, and descends into the kingdom of the damned.
While baptism is a “once and for all” event that should not be repeated in the Christian’s life, the effects of baptism continue throughout the life of the believer.
The giver of life, the source of joy, stands weeping together with the human family as they grieve under the curse of sin.
Our leaders, our pastors, our priests, our teachers, all have feet of clay, just as leaders in Israel did. We do not put our faith in them, even in the ones—perhaps *especially* the ones—in whom we are inclined to have great expectations. They preach the Messiah but are not the Messiah.
Take away the communal aspect, take away the communal gathering around Christ’s body and blood, and the Christian will begin to suffer a malnutrition of faith.
God invites you to confess the skeletons in your closet so that he might bury them in the grave for good.
The story of Juneteenth is one of living between proclamation and emancipation, and the story of the Christian faith is one of living in that same tension.
This is an edited excerpt from “The Pastoral Prophet: Meditations on the Book of Jeremiah” written by Steve Kruschel (1517 Publishing, 2019).
This article comes to us from 1517 guest contributor, Karen Stenberg.
Everyone is living as a naked sufferer who’s been duped into believing that the nakedness of suffering has to be covered up.
We prefer God to forgive our sin by not paying attention to it. Then our prayer is not for grace but that God would overlook and wink at us from the sidelines.