Media

Location

Sunday Service

10 AM

Pastors

David Sczepanski
Jason Jordan

When a sinner first has the eyes of his understanding opened, they are directed downward upon his own unblessed and lost state. The law constrains a man to look chiefly at himself, and drives him to compare his corrupted nature with the holiness of God and his guilt with the righteousness of God…But afterward the Holy Spirit lifts the eyes of our understanding to Jesus only. It is a blessed thing when a believing soul looks in the Word for Jesus only…when he does not look about him to lay hold on his own scattered thoughts, nor behind him at Satan who threatens him with the thought that his prayer is in vain, nor within him at his sloth and lack of devotion; but looks up to Jesus, who sits at the right hand of God and makes intercession for us.

Bo Giertz
Hammer of God, 203
(Fortress Press, 1960)

Christians routinely describe life using an allegory of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt…[believing that] Christians…[are on] an exodus out of vice and into virtue…on a journey away from badness toward goodness. But [Martin] Luther bluntly said faith is not a transition from vice to virtue, it is “the way from virtue to the grace of Christ”.

Steven Paulson
Lutheran Theology, 2
(T&T Clark, 2011)