romans on Government

God of Love and Mercy—Father, Son and Holy Spirit: As those beloved by You...You give us the privilege of loving others and praying for them ... as we do today. We pray on behalf of those for whom th...

You know all about us–our weakness, our failing, our sin; and you still love us enough to give your Son to redeem us. Hear the cries of our hearts today. There’s someone for whom it was hard to get ou...

W.H. Auden is one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. Auden grew up in England but spent some of his adult years in the United States. In November 1939, he found himself in a German-language mo...

I have been reading Julian Jackson’s biography of Charles de Gaulle — it’s exceptional, so far — and I find myself meditating on a story Jackson tells near the beginning of the book. In June of 1940, ...

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any pre...

Hope is the physician of each misery.

Pastor: Lord God, Maker of heaven and earth. You are amazing and powerful, yet You love each of us dearly. We give You thanks for sustaining all of creation and remembering Your covenant faithfulnes...

Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to w...

A leader is a dealer in hope.

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord; Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgivenes...

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

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...

Heavenly Father, we stand in awe of Your creation. You are the master of design. You know the change of seasons, You know the orbit of planets, and You know exactly what human beings were made for: a ...

Heavenly Father, give us hearts that wait with faith. Build in us the assurance that you are at work and in control. Forgive us for our impatience, our uneasiness, and our wandering desires when we do...

Again and again in China I talked to people who had never heard of Christianity, never heard of Jesus, never heard a single word from the Bible. Yet through nature and their God-given conscience, many...

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was mean...

Let us drink to the success of our hopeless cause.

God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: You are always and forever for us: We can’t run away from Your presence; nor out-sin Your amazing grace and forgiveness. We can’t exhaust Your unconditional love nor ...

The Danish philosopher and contrarian Soren Kierkegaard once compared Christians of his time to a flock of geese in a barnyard. Every week, they listened to an eloquent speaker who recounted the stori...

Lord—we’re so anxious we can’t wait! Some of us can’t wait for Christmas to come, while (honestly) some others of us can’t wait for it to be over. We’re not proud of it—but that’s just the way it is ...

Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality.

The inordinate desire in the west to increase productivity, to go faster and faster, especially in business, can actually become counterproductive. In this short story from the Chinese philosopher Men...

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.

A man went in for his annual checkup and received a phone call from his physician a couple of days later. The doctor said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” “What’s the news?” the man asked...

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is gooder than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good new...

Put another way, what you think about God will shape your destiny in life. If you think of God as homophobic, racist, and mad at the world, this distorted vision of reality will shape you into a relig...

Preaching Commentary Context A Dire Warning All the way back in the Pentateuch God warned the people of Israel that their residency in the promised land was predicated upon their obedience to the ...

Pastor: In You alone we put our hope, God the Father, Creator and Sustainer, People: who gives all good things, seen and unseen. Pastor: In You alone we put our hope, God the Son, Savi...

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.

Doubt is really the felt tension that exists between a belief you have and a contrary claim you do not yet believe…Simply put, doubt is that experience of one of our beliefs seeming like it might be f...