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This is an excerpt from Ditching the Checklist: Assurance of Salvation for Evangelicals (and Other Sinners) by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 5-7.
Christ has taken our failures and defeats and exchanges that yoke for his own.
God's justice is marked and measured by sacrificial love, not power as the world defines it.
When the story begins in creation and ends in restoration, all the moments in between are filled with the working of God.
On this day in 1984, Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller, a leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, died. He left behind a controversial legacy. How should we regard him today, thirty-six years after his death? Was he a hero? Was he a villain?
The implications were clear: Jesus’ death destroyed the things that distinguished people as educated or uneducated, rich or poor, free or enslaved, black or white, pious or godless.
Baptized believers are in Christ and of Christ. Once they were alienated from and hostile to God, now they have been reconciled through the work of Christ. This forgiveness is not unconditional. Christ is the condition and, indeed, He fulfills all the conditions.
Out of His mind indeed, as He took our place between murderers and received the insults and torture of humanity.
The law demands love, and love has no limits, no end, it is never done.
So it is with my little garden as well; dead, so it would seem. Nothing. Barren.
But on the mountain in Galilee, where we encounter a very different side of God, doubts overtake us. Why?
We hang on to our sins not despite the fact that they hurt, but precisely because they do hurt. We need to hurt, to fret over them, to cry over them, to make amends over them, because by doing so, we will grease the wheels of God’s forgiveness.