The wrath of death make life necessarily brief! Fear of wrath and hope of bliss means, for sinner and saints, there is no more time to waste! Break with guilty past! Seize the blessed hope! Bear fruit while life lasts before you leave to be with Christ!   Psalm 90 in Psalter Sequence Canonically positioned... Continue Reading

I am still learning about Law and Gospel through the scriptures, and Luther helps me take hold of them, because the flesh always abides and the Gospel is always counterintuitive. Thus, the good Doctor wisely teaches me that I will never fully learn these lessons until I am finally purged of my sinful, self-justifying flesh... Continue Reading

NATO has absorbed nearly all the former Warsaw Pact countries and Baltic states that were once aligned with the former Soviet Union. To channel Mearsheimer one more time, America and NATO want us to believe that all their actions and decisions since the fall of the Soviet Union were virtuous and morally right. “This war,”... Continue Reading

The whole style and shape of the Book of Revelation is by way of an epistle. It is Jesus Christ, by John, writing His last will to His church. And if any Scripture displays the sovereignty, majesty, justice, mercy and truth of God, for the comfort of His people, and in a way that makes... Continue Reading

Words are powerful. What we say shapes the way we view ourselves and our circumstances. Our feelings often reveal our unstated assumptions, our hidden beliefs, and the unrecognized stories by which we make sense of our lives. And then our words give voice to these feelings and reshape or reinforce — for good or ill... Continue Reading

We all need to find the best form of rest for ourselves and then to protect that time in our schedules with all our might. The degree to which we fail to protect this time is the degree to which we will fail to be effective in everything else we do. And that is because... Continue Reading

Violating the third commandment, includes, but is not confined to, using “God” or “Jesus Christ” in our speech to utter exclamatory anger or excitement. No, to take the Lord’s name in vain is to not live in light of who God is and what He does and to invite and encourage others to do the... Continue Reading

There are so many lies abroad about worship.  Here are some of the most popular, in no particular order…. Everyone else worships better than you; you’re the only one who gets bored, has trouble concentrating, and whose mind wanders during prayer. The small offerings you bring, the pitiful singing you give, your feeble attempts at... Continue Reading

When we read and interpret the Bible, we should seek to do so in a manner that if we were to have a conversation with God, God would have no corrections for us. This means our interpretation should defer to what God intended in a passage, and also how God chose to communicate that passage, through a... Continue Reading

The tree of life is no more a “magical tree” than the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is not the fruit that results intrinsically in the life associated with the former not in the death associated with the latter. Instead, both trees are ordinary trees with judicially assigned functions emblematic of... Continue Reading