The certainty of faith is utter assurance because it depends upon nothing of your own. It is entirely trusting that God is a propitious, pardoning God—the God who justifies sinners by forgiving them.
Sinners get faith as a gift when Christ takes their captivity captive.

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Lent exists because we are forgetful creatures. We forget how hungry we really are.
The Pharisee valued fasting and giving tithes, but could not find value in his fellow sinner.
We can willingly admit the fact that we're just like tax collectors and thieves.
Worship never existed as escape from the world, but preparation for life within it.
The reasoning was always the same. The gods were angry. The gods were hungry. The gods required payment.
Although the outcome has been decided by Jesus victory, the devil won’t give up without a fight.
A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.
While we often talk about our growth, our progress, and what we are doing for the kingdom of God, the reality is that any goodness in a Christian does not originate in us.
Surveying Scripture, it is an immense comfort to know we’re not alone in our sinfulness.
Christian faith is never a solitary possession. When the congregation confesses, the old speak for the young, the strong for the weak, and the clear-voiced for the trembling.
The entire history of Protestantism is downstream of a goldsmith in Mainz figuring out how to cast identical pieces of lead type in less than a minute.
We can’t remove our crosses or the reality of our deaths. Only Jesus can.