This is an excerpt from this year’s 1517 Advent Devotional.
Thanksgiving, then, is not just about plenty. It is about redemption.
Why is it truly meet right and salutary that we should at all times and all places give thanks to God.

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The reason nothing can come before Jesus is because nothing endures beyond the grave except for Jesus.
As the Spirit does His work, He produces new ways of living for individuals, households (like Philemon’s) and communities, that is, the Church.
The legal record of debt for our sin was canceled because Jesus satisfied the legal demands for us by his life, death, and resurrection.
All of this is interesting and useful in preparing a sermon, however, there are no explicit words of Gospel in this text. How does one preach without shoe-horning the Gospel into the message, perhaps in an inappropriate or confusing manner?
Love for the brethren should be the hallmark of the Christian Church. It is basic to our witness to an unbelieving world .
In the text, Jesus enters a Pharisee’s house for dinner. Between the invitation and the meal, however, Jesus transforms this man’s home into a place of God’s care.
Our value and our values, our life, our everything is from Jesus Christ given to us as a gift.
We need to know the Christian faith—such as it does not capitulate with Zeitgeist—always comes with a price of being maligned, persecuted, marginalized, blamed, you name it.
When offering encouragement to His disciples to follow Him, Jesus did not promise a pain-free life in this world. Instead, He highlighted the struggle and the difficulty. Why?
As is often the case in Scripture, creation is about a renewed, restored, and redeemed relationship with the Creator.
The battle is not so much recognizing sins as admitting them. It is also not so much confessing them as repenting them or laying them aside. But we can do it. Looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith...
The real presence of the LORD does not pop-up unannounced when Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper—it has been a theme from the days in the Garden of Eden when He walked and talked with His people.