St. Paul Lutheran Church

06/02/2026

Christianity has far too many voices that would have us believe in a God who doesn’t wound us. But the Lord declares otherwise: “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal” (Dt. 32:39).

Or as we read today in Bible in One Year from Hosea, “Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (6:1-2).

Verses like these are summarized perfectly by Proverbs 3:12, “The LORD disciplines the one he loves” (see Hebrews 12:6).

Would a loving parent let a child get away with everything? Pour rat poison into his cereal? Run onto an interstate? Play with a loaded pistol? Of course not. That is the definition of unloving parenting.

So with our Father. He disciplines us because he cares for us. He knows that we often learn hard but necessary lessons only in our woundedness.

Our Father knows that it is only in our weakness and woundedness that we simultaneously discover our own ineptitude and his healing power. Without wounds, we foster an image of ourselves as strong and healthy.

But the hands that wound us—they themselves bear the stigmata of grace. Our Savior kills, but only to make alive; wounds, but only to heal. He is conforming us to his cruciform likeness so that we see ourselves exclusively in his resurrection reflection.

This is Christian growth: to become in our weakness more and more dependent on his strength, to seek in our woundedness more and more of his healing.

06/02/2026

05/24/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1i4NorBLMk/

"Luther wrote Concerning Rebaptism in 1528. Not many years before that, the Reformation had gone far beyond what Luther had intended. He had wanted merely a reformation of certain errors in the Church, but during his absence at the Wartburg, it spread out of control. In particular, this disorder flowed out of what we call the “Radical Reformation,” which manifested itself in a group called the “Anabaptists” (the prefix “ana-” means again, so the Anabaptists taught that you had to baptize “again”). The Anabaptists took Luther’s understanding of salvation by grace through faith and abused it. Their understanding was that faith was all that was needed. Some even went so far as to say that you didn’t even need Scripture. You could just have faith and you could know what God was telling you. You could in fact just have the Holy Spirit come to your heart and God would speak directly to you. However, this faith was something that infants didn’t have. Therefore, one needed to be an adult to be baptized. The Anabaptists pointed to Mark 16:16 which said, “All who believe and are baptized will be saved.” They said that since belief was listed first, it had to happen first in chronological order. Belief had to come first, then baptism. As a note, this idea is in many ways the same held by many Baptists in our day.

In fact, Luther says, “It was a correct baptism in itself, regardless of whether it was received rightly. For the words were spoken and everything that pertains to baptism was done as fully as when faith is present. If a thing is in itself correct you do not have to repeat it even though it was not correctly received. You correct what was wrong and do not have to do the entire thing over. Abuse does not change the nature of a substance, indeed it proves the substance. There can be no abuse unless the substance exists.”[8] Just because God’s word in baptism is abused by unbelief, the substance of that baptism still remains. He argues, “Should then human error and wickedness be stronger than God’s good and invincible order?”[9] Certainly not, God’s Word far exceeds human weakness, and so baptism does not depend on the weakness of man, but on the strength and perfection of the Lord."

Taken from link below.
https://lutheranreformation.org/theology/concerning-rebaptism/

05/22/2026

Here’s a fascinating example of why it’s not only helpful to study the Hebrew Old Testament but also the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint.

The Septuagint heavily influenced New Testament writers, and at times they chose their Greek in such a way as to echo what was happening in the Old Testament. That echo becomes clear when you compare the Greek of the Old Testament with the Greek of the New Testament.

Here’s the example. In Luke 7, Jesus raises the widow’s son at Nain. Afterward, we are told that “he gave him to his mother [ἔδωκεν αὐτὸν τῇ μητρὶ αὐτοῦ]" (Luke 7:15).

Initially, that seems an odd detail, right? His mother is right there, so why would Luke add that Jesus "gave him to his mother"?

The answer is found in the Septuagint in 1 Kings 17:23, which we read today in Bible in One Year. After Elijah raises a dead boy to life again, the prophet “brought him down from the upper room into the house and gave him to his mother [ἔδωκεν αὐτὸν τῇ μητρὶ αὐτοῦ]."

If you are reading both the Old Testament and the New Testament in Greek, the connection is unmistakable. Luke is intentionally echoing Elijah’s miracle.

The further confirmation of the overlap between the miracle by Elijah and the miracle by Jesus is that the crowds respond, “A great prophet [!] has arisen among us!” (Luke 7:16).

They saw the similarities between what was done, even as we, the readers of the text, see *and* hear the similarities.

What Luke is doing, then, is alerting us that Jesus has performed an Elijah-like miracle. But more than that, he is showing that Jesus is the new and greater Elijah. The ministry of Elijah becomes a kind of pattern or foreshadowing of what Jesus will do.

Jesus is indeed a prophet, but he is more than a prophet. By echoing Elijah in this way, Luke helps us see both the continuity and the escalation: what God once did through his servant, he now does more fully and finally in his Son.
_______
Join us for Bible in One Year at any time! https://www.1517.org/oneyear