Wisdom and strength require bootstrap-pulling and the placing of noses to grindstones.
“If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith?

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God is coloring over your sin and making you fragrant; he is making you righteous in his sight. The old is gone, forever covered over by this new work.
The following is an excerpt from “The Christian Life: Cross or Glory” written by Steven A. Hein (1517 Publishing, 2015).
Love continues to gently but endlessly pursue the narrator, despite his persistence in pulling away in the opposite direction.
Unlike human marriage, which is marred by sin, Jesus never seeks to divorce us due to irreconcilable differences.
When we genuinely measure ourselves, we will find ourselves dreadfully lacking.
Good works do not make a Christian, do not secure the grace of God and blot out our sins, they do not merit heaven.
We subject ourselves to the governing authorities for the sake of our neighbor, that they might be protected from our sinful nature that seeks our advantage over theirs (and vice versa)
The parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew hinges on whether a guy is wearing the right costume for the party.
We now stand holy and blameless before our Heavenly Father as his own dear children, and we are set free to serve our neighbor in love.
The command to love those nearby is as challenging as it is simple. Jesus took the initiative to come near to us in loving sacrifice.
The Gospel is a precious and comforting word. It comforts and refreshes the sad heart. It wrestles it out of the jaws of death and hell and transports it to the certain hope of eternal life, through faith in Christ.
Imperatives are good for many things. Luther said the Law is good, but precisely because it is good, it has become poison and death to the bad. The Law does not give life but evaluates it, and we encounter day in and day out its negative evaluation of us.