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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We can’t all afford to travel the world, but the more we read from outside our own context, the bigger we see the world.
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. It can get ahold of a person and turn him all the way in on himself. What seemed a brief reflection lingers for hours, days, weeks, even years.
The whole Reformation, and the reason for Lutheran theology at all, is to improve preaching.
I’d like to offer a short reflection on the theme of “worldliness” as it appears in his later work and how that’s connected to an item of his Lutheran heritage: the theology of the cross.
All I need to know about your spiritual condition, I can discover by watching you drive your car. What I’ve learned is that everyone is a lawbreaker, including me. It’s as simple as asking a few short questions about your driving habits...
The following is an excerpt from “A Year of Grace: Collected Sermons of Advent through Pentecost” written by Bo Giertz and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2019).
I heartily sympathize with you and earnestly pray our Lord Jesus Christ to strengthen you and give you a cheerful heart. I should like to know, and am making diligent inquiries to find out, what your trouble may be or what has caused your breakdown.
We can take comfort in the knowledge that He kills the sinner so we can get a new shot at life and life eternal.
Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy.
When orthodoxy becomes a Law, heterodoxy can feel like the Gospel.
We're going to worry about what people think of us. It's going to get in the way of our relationship with Jesus. We're going to fear God's judgment. But, we're also baptized into Christ. So we don't give up hope. Jesus will help us and strengthen us. He will guide us in his Baptismal grace and peace.
We do not, as followers of Jesus, put any hope or place any trust in “princes, in mortal man, in whom there is no salvation” (Ps. 146:3).