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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Reading includes, on some level, striving. Hearing, on the other hand, remains passive.
Zephaniah has given us something more visceral to help us understand the love of God: the sound of salvation.
The earliest followers of God sang their faith, which is no different today as we sing of the hope we have in Jesus.
We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
Hidden beneath the sinner is a glorious saint. Jesus has declared it to be so in your baptism.
God has the power to take that which is small, that which is overlooked, that which is despised, and use it to create something wonderful.
Even as he was dying, the heart of God poured itself out for the sake of sinners.
I hope your people expect and even demand this of you. But how we proclaim the central message, that can (and probably should) vary.
Authentic proclamation, then, is the love of Christ for our souls, which we have seen and experienced through the under-shepherd’s pastoral care put into the words of Christ Himself.
I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.
Morons though we all have been, there is nothing we need that Christ hasn’t given us.
Though it may feel to us like the darkness is winning, God’s Word reveals the darkness is waning. The Light of the world has come.