We Must Not be Self-Righteous

"The prodigal son in today’s Scripture passage returned to his father after squandering all his possessions. He said to his father, “I am not worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. Take me in as your servant.” Given the context of today’s Scripture passage, we can conjecture here that this prodigal son clearly became

Are You That Kind of Person?

What Kind of People Can Be Saved by Believing in the Righteousness of God? "What kind of people has God accepted to be His children? Those who recognize their sinful selves before God and desire to believe in His righteousness; those who believe in Jesus as their Savior and also believe in His baptism and His blood on the Cross; those who believe

Do You Consider Yourself Meritorious?

Do You Consider Yourself Meritorious? "We have absolutely no spiritual merit at all. Yet by any chance, do we not think that we ourselves are good and virtuous, that we are qualified to be saved, and that we deserve to be blessed by God? But such thoughts are just our own human delusion. When we look at ourselves as reflected on the Word of God, o

We Need This Realization

"Jesus Christ has saved people who have neither their own righteousness nor their own virtues, who know that they are insufficient, and who realize that they are sinful and therefore doomed to hell. It’s to save precisely these people that the Lord came to this earth. God did not come to this earth to save those whose lives are virtuous, upright, a

We Must Lose, to Win!

"The prodigal son in today’s Scripture passage lost everything. He had gone out to the world and squandered all the inheritance that he had received from his father, and although he tried to survive on his own later on, he couldn’t even do this. He got a job as a hired servant to feed someone else’s pigs and tried to survive on the pods that the pi