MICAH 7:18–20 One of the greatest mistakes of most people with faith, in my opinion, is thinking that, for God, grace is a “contract” with conditions and clauses. You cannot simply proclaim God’s forgiveness as free and unconditional, because otherwise people will abuse it and use it as an excuse to do whatever they want. So the solution for many becomes what we might call “almost-grace.” “Jesus died for your sins, but now you have to prove to Him that you are serious about y

Have you ever received a message and thought, “I’ll reply later”? Maybe a phone call from a friend, an email that needed a response, or a message from a family member. At that moment, it didn’t feel urgent. There were other things to do. Work demanded attention. The house needed cleaning. Errands had to be done. So the message was put aside. Then hours became days, and days became weeks. The opportunity to respond slowly faded away—not because the message was unimportant, but

There is a moment that happens to almost everyone, sooner or later in life. You walk into a room confident, comfortable, perhaps even convinced that you have everything under control, and then suddenly you realize that you do not belong there as much as you thought you did. Maybe it was your first university lecture, surrounded by people who seemed smarter than you. Maybe it was standing beside a hospital bed, realizing that you could not save the person you love. Or perhaps

Sometimes in life you only get one chance to do certain things. One chance to speak to someone, or about something. One chance to take an exam, for example. And most preachers get only one chance to speak about the Holy Spirit, and that is at Pentecost. The only day of the year (unfortunately) when we remember the third Person of the Trinity. And this means, of course, that preachers often cannot say everything there is to say about the Spirit, and today, I fear, will be no e

One of the things that makes us Lutherans famous is the emphasis we place on how difficult it is to put faith in the Gospel with all our heart, even as Christians. Our unbelieving nature recoils; it refuses to believe that God has manifested such love for me and sends us new graces every day. Even the non-Christians here in the West, who chatter so much about God's love, don’t truly believe it. When they talk about God, prayer, or the afterlife, they immediately start explain

Forty days after the resurrection, the disciples stand on the Mount of Olives and witness Jesus ascending into heaven. As He blesses them, He is taken from their sight. Yet the Day of the Ascension is not about Christ abandoning His Church. It is about Christ taking His throne. The One who was crucified now reigns. The One who was rejected by the world now sits at the right hand of the Father. The One who humbled Himself unto death is exalted above all things. And this is of