Tag: baptism
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Other People Don’t Decide Your Value
There are few pains more personal than rejection. It hurts when strangers reject you.It hurts when family and friends reject you.It hurts when people who share your confession, your language, and your history reject you. And when that happens, the temptation is obvious. You begin to wonder whether their rejection says something final about you.…
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People’s Opinions Don’t Define You (The Prayer of Jabez)
Other people have incredible power over things that matter to you. They can physically hurt your body. They can discourage and distract your soul from looking at Jesus. They can steal and take your possessions. And they can also slander and libel you to destroy your reputation. I’ve spent a lot of time reading Luther’s…
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Sanctification Is Knowing God’s In a Good Mood with You
Many Christians think sanctification means becoming less disappointing to God. That’s why self-help books are quite popular with lots of Christians. And why many Christian books are quite similar to self-help books. Because if you view sanctification as essentially moral improvement, it is essentially “self-help.” Many of these same Christians rightly affirm that sanctification is…
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Owning the Keys Means Every Vocation is Spiritual
People sometimes speak as though pastors and missionaries do “spiritual” work, while everyone else merely has an ordinary job. Martin Luther rejected that distinction. Every Christian has the same baptism, the same Gospel, the same faith, and the same standing before God. Christians have different offices and different work to do. All these vocations are…
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How Can I Understand the Bible?
You can read the Bible cover to cover, repeatedly, in multiple translations… and still not understand it. At the end of Luke’s Gospel, some of the disciples who’d been with Jesus for years, heard his teachings, even seen his miracles, still did not understand. Even after Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them,…
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Why hasn’t the church collapsed?
The church is full of rubbish people. People making mistakes.People struggling with doubt.People who behave badly. How on earth is it still here? That is the question that Mark answers at the end of his Gospel. I was taught my whole life that the end of Mark’s Gospel is not original. Because the ending is…
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When God Commanded Genocide: 2 Jesus Died for Every Amalekite
God commanded ancient Israel to commit genocide. You and I are rightly troubled by that. In our first post, we looked squarely at the most clear and difficult passage in the whole Bible on this, 1 Samuel 15:1-3, where God commands Saul to slaughter the Amalekites: every “man and woman, child and infant, ox and…
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Why “If I Stop…” Feeds Your Porn Addiction
“It will rewire your brain.”“It will damage your relationships.”“It will control you.” You’ve been told these warnings countless times. You believe them. You’ve seen them in your life. And yet—no matter how many times you hear them—you eventually crawl back again to that phone, that laptop, that website. “You’ll finally feel clean.”“You’ll become more confident…