Reconciliation with God affirms the worth of our persons, and it banishes the inhibitions and fears, as well as the resentments and desire for revenge, which create gulches between us and those around us.
Forgiveness is ours, Luther continually proclaimed, because Christ has put His claim on our sins and taken them as His own to the Cross and into His tomb.
This restoration to righteousness that results in our freedom for loving and supporting other people whom God places within our reach takes place, Luther believed, through Christ’s liberating victory over Satan.
The challenges of meeting severe crises and the hurdles which dare us to say something meaningful to the satisfied and richly blessed can make us wonder what we are really there to do as we come into the pulpit.
God reveals Himself as a tender-hearted, deeply caring parent—even to the point of deeply grieving over us when we stop listening to Him. But in Job, and sometimes in our daily experience, He reveals Himself as a whole lot more.
As we celebrate Advent and Christmas, we flex the muscles of a new season, a new year, a new life which His resurrection and our baptisms have bestowed upon us.
The gift of publicly serving as minister of God’s Word for the people we are called to serve brings us endless blessings, but like many blessings it brings also the sense of responsibility that takes seriously the challenge of accurate communication of what the Lord is saying to us from the pages of Scripture.
Twenty-first century North American believers face challenges unique in the history of God’s people, for we have an abundance of the material gifts of God unparalleled in human history.