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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God always keeps his promises even if/when we don’t. God is always faithful even if/when we aren’t.
God leads us to the refuge that’s more secure and safe than any man-made thing, more than anything we own, more than anything that owns us.
People are searching for connection, direction, and hope in a troubled world, and we can use their star-shaped questions to point them to the shape of the cross.
Now, if there were another way to heaven, doubtless, he would have made it known to us.
For those of us who recognize the disciples’ despair in ourselves, Jesus comes with the same word: “Relax, it’s me. Peace be with you.”
This is an excerpt from the introduction of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted written by Gretchen Ronnevik (1517 Publishing, 2021). Now available for preorder.
It’s God’s love that sets us free to love in the first place.
The result of this day’s proceedings, in Luther’s mind, was likely to be a painful death at the stake.
The Holy Spirit does what his name implies. He makes us holy. We believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord, and come to him only by the Holy Spirit who calls us with the gospel.
Jesus is proclaiming the good news that he has come to put an end to laboring to be loved by God.
The cross is not some mystic metaphor for the change we must undergo before our self-realization, but the earth-shattering event that changed the course of eternity.
We will always need comfort until the reign of God, his kingdom, comes in full with Christ’s return, and our suffering and the sin that causes it is no more.