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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Luther saw that God demands not that we become perfectly righteous like God but that we simply receive the gift of righteousness; a gift that actually makes us worthy.
Evangelism is hard work requiring lots of patience. Churches and mission boards are often too impatient and want to see numerical growth explode overnight.
Absolution is the word God speaks to cause his sin-dead creation to live.
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.
Just as the grave could not hold the Lord of Life, neither could the calendar contain Easter to just one Sunday.
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.
God has a strange delivery system, the foolish preaching of the cross and foolish preachers for Christ’s sake delivering it.
The result of this day’s proceedings, in Luther’s mind, was likely to be a painful death at the stake.
Jesus rejects what we believe is most necessary and instead points us to his pain, suffering, death, and self-sacrifice.
Jesus is proclaiming the good news that he has come to put an end to laboring to be loved by God.