romans on Living Life

Almost as important as oxygen for human survival is hope. According to Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, “Since my early years as a physician, I learned that taking away hope is, to most people, like pronounci...

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

We thank You, God our Father, for Your grace, mercy and love, expressed today through Your Word and Sacrament; and we ask You to help us to pray and to know what to pray. You give us all good gifts: Y...

A living faith is that which pours itself out in works.

Hannah was one of my wife’s work colleagues. She used to love spending time with our congregation, but she found the gospel message just plain weird. We did some Bible studies with her over the summer...

Pastor: Heavenly Father, as we draw ever closer to the end of this Lenten season of repentance and renewed devotion, we pray that You would remember us according to Your steadfast love and goodness ...

When I was considering the possibility of embracing Christian faith as a young college student, what I feared most was that it would make my life smaller rather than larger—less love, less joy, less c...

A holy life will make the deepest impression. Lighthouses blow no horns, they just shine.

The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it...

Amazing grace How sweet the sound. That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, But now am found. Was blind, but now I see. Lord of all, you have called us toward a new way of life. Give...

Our church has a large open field next to it, with a tall wooden cross in the middle– perhaps 15-feet high or so.  I love that cross. I’m always struck by its isolation, abrupt in the midst of land wi...

For although faith alone justifies, love is also demanded…. A living faith is that efficacious, burning trust in the mercy of God which never fails to bring forth good fruits.

Faith cannot but pour forth from all creatures in most eager service to God as a dutiful son serves a godly father. The efficacy of faith is such that from its fruits it is very evident in whose heart...

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. A...

But we must add at once that the pious will not cease from good works simply because it is impossible to gain any merit by them. Rather, the greater our faith, the more and greater our works…. For sin...

It seems that every four years, the American people come through another exhausting political season. No matter who “wins,” there are feelings of frustration and disgust on all sides as we observe the...

Faith is nothing else than trust in the divine mercy promised in Christ…. This trust in the goodwill or mercy of God first calms our hearts and then inflames us to give thanks to God for his mercy so ...

Pastor: Heavenly Father, save me from sin! I know I am righteous only through Jesus’ righteousness, but I greatly desire to be more like him! I am your child, so help me to resist the temptation to si...

The resurrection of Jesus is not simply the basis for Christian hope; it redefines the future toward which hope looks.

Adversity is not simply a tool. It is God's most effective tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives. The circumstances and events that we see as setbacks are oftentimes the very things that...

Shepherd Book: “River, you don’t . . . fix the Bible. River: It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense. Shepherd Book: It’s not about . . . making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that b...

God stretches our faith in order to prepare us to receive his promises. That often requires painful rewiring. We need updating, just as an old house may need rewiring. The old electrical wires might b...

Trivia time! What natural disaster is the most destructive to a forest? Chances are that the first thing that comes to mind is a forest fire. After all, fire is pure destruction to plants. What possib...

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer describes a surprising dynamic that sometimes occurs in the life of a Christian: believing so strongly in a loving God that one cannot fathom th...

When God Talks Back, psychological anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann sets out to explain how sensible people believe in an immaterial God. One aspect of evangelical Christianity that she finds particularl...

Someone once said that faith is not a personal possession until you have suffered. That person understood that the very nature of faith requires the grit and courage to be in the dark so you can event...

Let us drink to the success of our hopeless cause.

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking. But it's one of the great thing...

Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the nonexistent.