1517 Blogcast

Forde’s work testifies to the liveliness and vitality of confessional Lutheranism, and its promise for the continuing need to preach Christ crucified in this, and every, age until the Lord’s return.

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’s touch of this leper is the touchstone of the gospel itself. It’s a living parable of his entire ministry.

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.

You have this Shepherd who knows your voice, your cry, your incessant baaing.

Jesus offers to the anxious soul the one thing it ironically wants: certainty of the good.

God loves you no matter what. Loves you no matter how many times you have screwed up. Loves you to death, he does.

Tomorrow Jesus will laugh his way out of the tomb, spit in the face of death, and kick the devil in the throat as he dances to the clapping glee of angelic masses. But today he just rests. It is the final Sabbath of God.

The cross offends so much that the only way for it to free you is to stop looking at it and have it preached.