The Letter Kills, the Spirit Gives Life

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1. 00:00

   Bob Hiller

   God means to kill sinners and destroy idols with the law. And I know it sounds harsh, but he does it for a good reason. Because he’s the sort of God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not. He must kill us if he’s going to raise us to a new life. He must drive us to despair of ourselves if we’re ever going to cling to him alone. It’s good that the letter kills, because then the Spirit can come over our dead bodies and raise us to a new life. And he does so with another word. And this other word that he speaks, which gives life to the dead and creates faith that lives only on his word—it is the word that is almost a foreign language to a world of law and legalism and the lie of autonomy.

2. 00:45

   Bob Hiller

   It’s a word of promise, a word of unconditional love, a word that doesn’t demand or deal in transaction, but rather a word that announces another has met the demands of the law for you. He has purchased you with his own obedience and blood, and he loves you with an everlasting love that forgives all of your sins and all of your transgressions and all of your violations of the law. We call this word the gospel, and the gospel speaks of Christ Jesus.

3. Bob Hiller

   [~01:14] BOB HILLER - 2 Corinthians chapter 3. Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. Such confidence we have through Christ before God, not that we’re competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit.

4. 01:59

   Bob Hiller

   For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Now, if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, transitory though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that brought condemnation was glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness? For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts? Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We’re not like Moses, who had put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. But their minds were made dull. For to this day, the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts.

5. 03:03

   Bob Hiller

   But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. So far the reading.

6. Bob Hiller

   [~03:25] BOB HILLER - I’ve been invited here today to talk to you about our theme from St. Paul, the letter kills and the Spirit gives life. And I’m very excited to talk about this because after all, I am a preacher. And the Lord has tasked his preachers to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

7. 03:46

   Bob Hiller

   And so law and gospel is the message his ambassadors are to deliver. As the great Lutheran theologian Bob Kolb has said, we preachers have the task of being God’s hitmen and midwives, to preach the law that kills and the gospel that gives life. So we come today to 2 Corinthians, where Paul is teaching us to distinguish the law from the gospel. Now, in this reading from 2 Corinthians, Paul speaks in a pretty strange way for my blood. But the good news is it’s not my blood that fills the pen of St. Paul, but it’s the Lord’s. He says the letter kills and the Spirit gives life. And we start to ask, what kind of antinomian nonsense is this that Paul has laid out for us? So negative about the letter, so free with the Spirit.

8. 04:35

   Bob Hiller

   What’s Paul after here? Rules versus freedom? Scripture versus spiritual movements in my heart? Religion versus spirituality? The letter sounds pretty bad. The Spirit, well, that sounds pretty good. Now, as sort of the resident Lutheran around here, I must confess that I have been known from time to time to play into this idea that the law is bad, that it’s the problem. I remember when I was in college, we had a professor who would talk to us about how we should teach law and gospel in the classroom. And what he would do is he would take a face and he’d put it up on the board, and he would make a sad face and say, “Now that’s the law.” And then he’d make a happy face and he’d say, “That’s the gospel.” And then third, he’d put a face with an open mouth, which was, I guess, the response to the law and gospel. And so that’s fine, I guess.

9. 05:28

   Bob Hiller

   As far as it goes, it just doesn’t go very far. Law bad, gospel good. Open your mouth and receive it. I don’t know, but that’s the idea. Law bad, gospel good. Let’s do something about it. But I’ll tell you, the longer I’m a pastor, or maybe better, the longer I’m a parent, the more I’ve begun to see the goodness of the law. And in spite of what you may have heard from many 20th-century Lutheran theologians, in the Lutheran Church, we have a very high view of the law, and in fact, a very positive view of the law.

10. 06:03

    Bob Hiller

    In one of our major confessional documents, the Formula of Concord, we define the law this way. It says, “We unanimously believe, teach, and confess that in its strict sense, the law is a divine teaching in which the righteous, unchanging will of God revealed how human beings were created in their nature, thoughts, words, and deeds to be pleasing and acceptable to God.” Actually, that sounds pretty good, that the law at its core is the will of God for his creation. God’s will is to have his creation live by faith alone in his word, trusting him to give us all good things and to use these things for the good of the creation around us, to love our neighbor and to, so to speak, tend to the garden. This is how the law is to be used. The law protects the gifts that God gives to us. And we see this very clearly, say, in the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments actually give us a beautiful picture of creation working rightly.

11. 07:07

    Bob Hiller

    We might even say of a righteous creation. People worshiping the one true God alone, not misusing his name, not putting any gods before him, but gathering to sit and hear and receive his word. And being so formed and shaped by that word that they would begin to pour out love in their lives. They would live lives where authorities and parents are honored, where life is promoted from womb to tomb, where marriage is celebrated and protected and not redefined, where people share their property in love and do everything they can to protect the property of their neighbor, where we speak well of each other and we live in contentment, thankful for everything God has given to us. It is a beautiful picture of what the creation is supposed to be like, how God has created us to live. God delighting in us, us delighting in God, receiving his gifts and expressing his love. It’s a beautiful picture.

12. 08:03

    Bob Hiller

    It’s wonderful. I think the Hebrew way of speaking of this is shalom, peace, wholeness. But then with all of that, St. Paul comes along and says these words: that this letter, this law engraved in letters on stone, is a ministry of death and that the letter kills? How’s that work? What’s Paul after here? Well, I think what Paul is doing for us today is he’s showing us a problem, and the problem isn’t the law. The problem is sin. The law is a beautiful picture of righteousness, which is a picture of death to the unrighteous.

13. Bob Hiller

    [~08:40] BOB HILLER - As Dr. Horton likes to say, we don’t break the law; the law breaks us. The law is given to describe righteousness and to kill anything that falls short of that picture, to expose it, to destroy it. That’s what the law is good for. That great document, the Formula of Concord, goes on to say, “The law also threatens its transgressors with God’s wrath and temporal and eternal punishments,” so that for the sinner, the law is always accusing, always attacking, always threatening that old sinful nature that clings so tightly to us. Now, again, this is a good thing, actually, because the law keeps us in check. It keeps us in check with its threats and also its promised rewards. Our sinful nature needs that sort of thing. But also, it puts to death anything that opposes God, including that sinful nature that dwells in us.

14. 09:40

    Bob Hiller

    And that’s what the sinful nature doesn’t like. See, the sinful nature, the old sinner in us, doesn’t want to die, so it fights back. There’s a great deal of pushback against the law, and we see this taking place all over our culture right now. Any institution or authority in our world is seen as a problem. Let’s take a very important example: baseball. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but in the 2026 season of Major League Baseball, they’re going to be implementing robot umpires because they want to keep the regular human being umpires in check. Why? Because we don’t trust the umpires. We don’t trust what they do.

15. 10:23

    Bob Hiller

    We push back against the authority. I had a member of my church a number of years ago who was a Little League umpire. His name was Bruce. Now, I got a quick side story about Bruce. He was a great guy. I loved Bruce. We called him Saint Bruce. He was wonderful.

16. 10:39

    Bob Hiller

    He was a guy who had pretty much abandoned the church for most of his life. He’d gone off to the service and had kind of just lived his life without any much care for God until late in life. He decided to come back and he and his wife started attending our church. But he would come to my office and he had all these hard questions and he doubted the reliability of the Bible and he wanted to see the truth of the Scriptures. And so he’d watch all the YouTube videos and he starts sending me the apologetics videos that were convincing to him. And boy, the Lord got him. The Lord just took Bruce and it was beautiful. Bruce, what he loved the most was the absolution, the forgiveness of sins that was proclaimed in church.

17. 11:15

    Bob Hiller

    And one Sunday, it was All Saints’ Day. I preached to the church that to be a saint doesn’t mean you live this morally high life better than everyone else, but to be a saint means that God is the one who’s called you holy. You therefore, because you are baptized, are a saint. And Bruce, as he’s leaving the service that Sunday, he comes up to me and he shakes my hand and he was flabbergasted. “Pastor, you think I am a saint?” I said, “Bruce, Jesus called you a saint. You’re a saint. Saint Bruce.” Oh, he loved it.

18. 11:45

    Bob Hiller

    Big old grin on Saint Bruce’s face. He was just thrilled. Anyhow, good old Saint Bruce. He was an umpire for Little League in North San Diego County. He was sort of the leader of many of the umpires there in North San Diego County. And I went to visit him one day and I was complaining about my kids’ Little League games and how the umpires weren’t doing a great job and how they kept getting all these calls wrong. And Bruce looked at me and said, “They weren’t wrong. The umpire was right. The umpire’s always right.”

19. Bob Hiller

    [~12:11] BOB HILLER - Then he told me a story about how once he had this guy, while he was calling a high school baseball game, sitting up in the stands, riding him for everything. Every call was wrong. Everything was off. And Bruce just had enough. This guy was just all over him. So between innings, Bruce decided to leave the field and he went up into the stands and he sat right down next to the guy. And the guy looks at him and says, “What are you doing? There’s a game to play.” And Bruce said, “You’re right, but clearly you can see things better from up here. So I figured I’d just go ahead and call the rest of the game from your seat.” It’s great. I loved Bruce. I told him, “Bruce, that was a great story. I guess that guy was probably right though, huh?” Bruce didn’t like that. Nonetheless, here’s the deal. This is the world we find ourselves in. We don’t like what the umpire has to say.

20. 12:57

    Bob Hiller

    We don’t like the law telling us what to do, let alone the law attacking us with our own sinfulness. So what we see now is that the law frightens our culture and the culture despises it. So what do we do when we fear or despise something? Well, this is what we’ve learned to do in fear is we either flee from it or we fight against it. It’s fight or flight. But I’ll tell you, I think in this situation it is both fight and flight. We decide to become the law to the law, and we begin to accuse the law, and we begin to attack the law. Then we flee to our own laws that we make up for ourselves. These autonomous laws.

21. 13:35

    Bob Hiller

    Autonomy literally means a law unto ourselves. Now, though, that is a distorted form of the law. It’s even more dangerous because it’s still the law and it still accuses. See, no matter what we do with the letter, even when we fight against it or redefine it, the letter kills. The letter kills, but we always fight back. Just notice the way we treat this still. And a few more examples here. We love to be in the stands.

22. 14:02

    Bob Hiller

    We want to referee the umpire. In his kind of interesting podcast Against the Rules, Michael Lewis—you know Michael Lewis, Moneyball, wrote Moneyball, good movie—he’s pursuing the question of why don’t we trust authorities anymore in our society? And in his first episode, he looks at how NBA refs are monitored, and it is quite elaborate and quite fascinating. But at the end of the episode, he talks to his son, who is an 11-year-old who plays basketball and who throws a ridiculous fit every time a foul gets called against him, slams the ball, yells at the ref, because that’s what he sees his favorite NBA players doing. So at the end of the episode, Michael Lewis looks at his son and he asks him, “Do you have anything you want to say to the referees of the world?” And he says, “Yeah, don’t pick sides unless it’s my side.” That’s what we want. We want to tell the law what to do.

23. Bob Hiller

    [~14:59] BOB HILLER - Or let’s take a far more serious and dangerous example. I recently saw a video from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America from their most recent church convention, in which there was a woman speaking that said that the Bible says many things about women and girls that are patriarchal, that is therefore harmful. And as she’s saying this, all the Bible verses would say anything about women in the Bible are scrolling up and the side of the page. And at the end of her video, she says, “A Lutheran reading centered on Christ frees us from taking all the Scriptures only literally. We don’t have to conform to the social and cultural practices of the ancient world.” And as she says this, she picks up her Bible and hands it to someone else, taking it away, symbolizing how she doesn’t need the Bible to tell her what to do anymore. Notice what she’s doing here. She is sitting in the stands of the 21st century trying to call the game. And there’s this fight to be free from what the Bible says, this fight to be free from the beauty of the law so we can be autonomous and gods unto ourselves. But no one can live free from the law.

24. 16:08

    Bob Hiller

    You can’t escape it. And even when you fight against the law and flee to your own autonomous rule, what you end up finding is that you become even more legalistic. No one is more legalistic than the antinomian. Antinomian, the person who is anti-law. Just try saying anything positive about God’s law around someone who is a quote-unquote Christian antinomian and watch them turn into a legalist with a gospel when they say, “You’d better preach my way or else. If you don’t preach the gospel the way I want you to, you are not a Christian.” Boy, there’s the law right there. That is legalism at its finest.

25. 16:45

    Bob Hiller

    Only to find myself saying all of this to you today on this video and to realize that I’m the most pharisaical of us all. I’m very tempted by antinomianism, and I’ve heard myself talk that way. And I can’t sit here and say, “Thank you, God, that I’m not like those sinners over there,” because the law’s got me too. See, there it is. An 11-year-old basketball player making himself the authority over the referee. A church body making themselves an authority over God’s word. The antinomian, using the gospel as law. That is our culture with God’s law.

26. 17:18

    Bob Hiller

    Don’t tell us what to do unless we give you our approval. And this attempt to flee from or fight against the law doesn’t save us at all because the letter still kills. See, don’t think that just because you’ve tried to free yourself from the law of God and become your own law that somehow you can escape this fact that the letter kills. Because the law is a ministry of death. Creation has a design. God has a will, and you cannot escape a life that demands a performance that rewards and punishes. This was brought home to me recently in an interview I saw with Billy Corgan, the lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins. He was interviewed by good old Bill Maher.

27. 17:59

    Bob Hiller

    Now listen, I can’t recommend you listen to this, as it is certainly a very crass interview, but also it was pretty fascinating. They’re talking there about how marriage and family have given Billy Corgan joy and a freedom that he’d never had while he was living this sort of rock and roll lifestyle, to use our terms, this autonomous, antinomian way of life. And Maher can’t fathom this. He’s like, “You were so free, you could do whatever you want.” And Corgan said it didn’t work that way. He said, “I had $1 million by the time I was 24 years old. By the time I’m 26, I’m on TV, platinum records, SNL, cover of Rolling Stone. I could never find this sense of satisfaction with it, and I couldn’t understand why.

28. 18:40

    Bob Hiller

    “And everyone around me is like, ‘This is really incredible.’ And I’m like, ‘It is and it isn’t.’ The problem with all of it is that it’s transactional. No matter how many songs you write, it’s always, ‘Where’s the next one?’ No matter how many records you sold, there’s always someone who sold more records than you. No matter how good you are, there’s always somebody telling you, writing online, that you’re the worst thing that ever happened. There was always an asterisk or a qualifier. Even my band at times was transactional with me. I would write these massive songs and they didn’t care.

29. 19:15

    Bob Hiller

    “Only unconditional love in some facet of your life gives you the proper perspective about what is great about transactional things, but allows you to see them for what they are. There is no Valhalla at the top of Rock Mountain. Only unconditional love sort of clarifies what is great and not great about the transaction.” End quote. In other words, transactional words—the transactional, which is the language of the law—if you do this, then that—that language kills because it’s never satisfied. It always demands more, and it won’t stop until it gets what it demands: the death of everything that opposes it. See, the letter kills. And I want to maintain for you today that this is a good thing.

30. 20:01

    Bob Hiller

    It’s the work of the law. It’s God’s will to kill everything that opposes his will. This is why autonomy is a lie, by the way. And I maintain this is still a good thing. It is the work of the law. It is God’s will to kill everything that opposes his will. This is why, by the way, autonomy is a lie. Because Billy Corgan lived that law-unto-himself lifestyle, and it drove him to despair.

31. 20:27

    Bob Hiller

    Because you can’t get away from God’s law. He’ll even use our own sinful, amoral laws to destroy our idolatrous hearts. His letter, his capital-L letter, is always behind our own little letters, and you can only break yourself against it. The fighting and the fleeing are futile. And so is living in a world that knows nothing but law without the Spirit of Christ. Without the gospel. Martin Luther says, “Wherever the letter is, or the law without grace, there is no end to making laws, to teachings, and to works. And yet they are of no avail. No one becomes better through them. Everything remains dead in the letter.” Billy Corgan and Martin Luther are right. We need unconditional love. We need grace because the letter kills. So what can we do with this but just die? Let the law have its way. Let it do its work. Give up. You’re caught.

32. Bob Hiller

    [~21:26] BOB HILLER - God means to kill sinners and destroy idols with the law. And I know it sounds harsh, but he does it for a good reason, because he’s the sort of God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not. He must kill us if he’s going to raise us to a new life. He must drive us to despair of ourselves if we’re ever going to cling to him alone. It’s good that the letter kills, because then the Spirit can come over our dead bodies and raise us to a new life. And he does so with another word. And this other word that he speaks, which gives life to the dead and creates faith that lives only on his word, it is a word that is almost a foreign language to a world of law and legalism and the lie of autonomy. It’s a word of promise, a word of unconditional love, a word that doesn’t demand or deal in transaction, but rather a word that announces that another has met the demands of the law for you.

33. 22:25

    Bob Hiller

    He has purchased you with his own obedience and blood, and he loves you with an everlasting love that forgives all of your sins and all of your transgressions and all of your violations of the law. We call this word the gospel. And the gospel speaks of Christ Jesus, that Word of God that was with God and is God, and who put on flesh in the power of the Holy Spirit to give us forgiveness, life, and salvation. And as wonderful as the law is, this word of gospel is a far more glorious light. St. Paul says, “If the ministry that brought condemnation was glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness? For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!” The law kills, but the Spirit gives life. This is the word of Christ Jesus, who just is the most shocking sort of God when it comes to sinners, because once his law has done its job, after it has accused and condemned and executed the sinner, Christ Jesus can finally get to work in the ashes.

34. 23:36

    Bob Hiller

    For the conscience of a sinner, the law meets its end in Christ. Even the death that law brings finds its end in Christ. Just think about the time when the Lord Jesus shows up at the tomb of Lazarus. There God’s word of the law is echoing. He’s dead as a result of sinfulness inside of him. You’ve got his accusations against Jesus: “If you’d only been here, he wouldn’t have died.” But Christ shows up and he’s had enough of it.

35. 24:05

    Bob Hiller

    He must speak judgment, but he doesn’t like doing it. He’d much rather create with his word. He’d much rather heal and save. That’s why his word of law is an alien word, the prophet Isaiah says. He loves having lame men dropped in front of him while he’s preaching through a roof so that he can say to them the words that give life. He loves looking at them and saying, “I forgive you,” and then watching as that word gets into that man’s legs and he comes back to life and he dances right out of the room. Anyways, coming back to Lazarus, he comes to the grave of Lazarus, and Jesus just hates what his friend has done against the law to get himself into this mess of a grave. And so Christ Jesus weeps, but he doesn’t weep without the hope of resurrection on his lips.

36. 24:52

    Bob Hiller

    And so he says, “Lazarus, come out!” And the Spirit gives life, and Lazarus comes out. And Jesus says, “Unbind him and let him go.” And in that moment, I know Jesus is talking to the guy standing next to Lazarus, but I also have to wonder if he’s not talking to the condemnation of the law and the death that it gives. It’s like Jesus is saying, “All right, you’ve had your time, but I’m taking him back now. No more sins to condemn. I’ve forgiven all of them. No more condemnation for this guy who is in me. I call him my friend. You have nothing left to say to him, law. Thanks for your time, but it’s transitory. This righteousness I speak is eternal.”

37. Bob Hiller

    [~25:30] BOB HILLER - This is the art of law and gospel, learning to stop with the law after it’s done its work. When someone’s dead, you don’t need to kill them again. When someone has been raised to a new life, you don’t need to dress up like the Grim Reaper and start breathing down their neck. And I fear so many preachers do this without realizing it. They dress up like Moses and make their church look like this big institution of the letter. The Grim Reaper with skeleton smiles on and Bible verses for scythes coming after the beloved sheep of the Lord, trying to use Moses as a veil for Christ. And that’s enough of that, the Lord says. The law has met its limit. When it’s said its piece, the gospel must shine forth. See, the old covenant kills, but we are to minister the new covenant, which gives life. And this new covenant, this covenant is talked about in the New Testament as the covenant in Jesus’s blood, is the Spirit that gives life. It is the covenant of that blood, that blood shed on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins. It’s that covenant which silences the law.

38. 26:35

    Bob Hiller

    This new covenant we minister is the promise that Jesus of Nazareth, the second member of the triune God, was sent by his Father in the power of the Holy Spirit to take the ultimate accusation of the law upon himself. He fulfilled the law’s demands for you, both in living the law perfectly and then paying the penalty it exacts on sinners. He substituted his life for yours on the cross. He atoned for your sins with his own shed blood. His shed blood paid the penalty your sins and my sins deserve, so that his blood was shed to wash you clean. But then the law had done its work, and God raised Christ from the dead so that he might proclaim the victory that you indeed are forgiven on account of Christ Jesus. The law is done and forgiveness reigns. It is because of this that I can actually sit here today and announce to you that your sins are the ones Jesus died for.

39. 27:34

    Bob Hiller

    You are the one who is forgiven. As Jim Nestingen, that great Lutheran preacher, used to say, “The gospel has a name and address. It is for you.” The atoning death of Jesus is preached to you even now, and the Spirit gives life.

40. Bob Hiller

    [~27:48] BOB HILLER - And close with one story. It reminds me of our umpire pal, Saint Bruce. As I said, he just loved to ask questions and talk theology, but he was really enamored with the forgiveness of sins and the absolution.

41. 28:03

    Bob Hiller

    I remember one time before I ever met Bruce, many years before, I was with a group of pastors and we were talking about the worship service, and one of the pastors said, “Look, in our divine service, we announce the forgiveness of sins like three times, at the beginning and then in the sermon and then when we give the Lord’s Supper. Why do we do it so many times? Did we sin that much during the service that we need to do this?” And we had a long talk about it. Well, I thought about this conversation a lot. A pastor who thinks we speak forgiveness too much is something that makes me nervous. Anyhow, I remember one Sunday many years later when Bruce was coming to my church, he’s leaving the church and he looks at me and he goes, “Pastor, you forgave my sins three times today.” I said, “I know, Bruce. I know it’s kind of redundant.” He goes, “Redundant? It was incredible. I want you to do that again next week.”

42. Bob Hiller

    [~28:51] BOB HILLER - And I thought, take that, you theologian pastors. Ha! This is great because there’s the forgiveness of sins for Bruce. The Spirit gives life. Bruce was always great after the service, but Bruce did have to stop coming to church because Bruce got ALS. The Lord got Bruce before the ALS did. Let me tell you something about this guy. When you met with Bruce, you knew what it was to be with someone whose outer self was wasting away, but the inner self was being renewed day by day.

43. 29:21

    Bob Hiller

    I would go over to Bruce’s house when he couldn’t come to church anymore, and I would bring him the Lord’s Supper, and we’d talk sports and we’d talk theology. He’d been to Israel just before the ALS really kind of took over, and we would talk about his trip to the Holy Land. And it was wonderful. But there was really one reason I was there. I think Bruce liked me. I think he liked our conversations. But there was one reason he wanted me there, and that was for the sacrament and the forgiveness of his sins. And so I would take the bread and I would take the wine and I would go through the service with Bruce and I would pronounce the absolution over him to prepare him to receive the body and blood of Jesus.

44. 29:54

    Bob Hiller

    And he would take and he would eat and he couldn’t hold it with his hands because his hands were too weak. His muscles were too depleted. And I would place it on his lips and he would just smile and he would start to weep. And he would say, “He did that for me. Pastor, Jesus died for my sins. It was me he was dying for on that cross. So I’m forgiven.” And he would just smile and weep.

45. 30:21

    Bob Hiller

    And that was the confession that was found on Bruce’s lips as he went to be with the Lord. Yeah, the letter kills, and thanks be to God for it, because it removes all that we cling to and hope in that is not Christ. But once it’s done its work, Jesus is there standing over the grave with no veil over his face, saying to death and the law, “Unbind him, let her go.” And then he stands over you and breathes out his Spirit, and he blesses you and keeps you, makes his face to shine upon you and his graciousness to look upon you. He looks on you with his favor and he gives you his peace. And he says, “Rise up, you sleeper, awake. I forgive you your sins,” and the Spirit gives life. Amen.