What Israel’s story makes painfully obvious is that following the Lord is a lifelong lesson in “I believe, but help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).
Faith holds on to the truth of who Jesus is revealed to be, despite our sometimes incongruent experience with God.
This is an excerpt from the first chapter of A Reasoned Defense of the Faith by Adam Francisco (1517 Publishing, 2026), pgs 1-3.

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Want to do yourself, your family, your friends, and the world a good deed? Hold on loosely to your politics. Don’t drop it. Don’t toss it aside. Don’t privatize it. But, above all, don’t hold on to your politics as if your life, your soul, and your salvation depend on it.
In our transactional view of our faith - “If I don’t… then God won’t.” “I need to, so God can” - we are seriously underestimating who we are dealing with.
This tale of two professors has a common theme, plot, and denouement - the good news of the one true story, Jesus Christ crucified for you.
What if I’ve used up God’s forgiveness—he’s given me far too many chances and I’ve blown them all. Maybe his grace is for you but not for me. What if Jesus loved me once, but now regrets everything he’s done for me?
Jesus knows you and everybody else come from a long line of life wasters going all the way back to Adam. Jesus died for life wasters! Let go of your bootstraps. Stand back up. Your Father loves you.
What more could God do to prove to us that he is for us and not against us than to give his own Son into this fallen world to take the cross in our place, exchanging his righteousness for our many sins.
The church does well to remind the world that God is unmasked, indeed, that God has unmasked himself in the person of Jesus.
Jesus is our sympathizer, our propitiation, and our advocate. We will be tempted but God will provide the way out, the way out is Jesus, the one who died for our sins.
Perhaps this past year has prompted the recognition that God is not the tame projection of our highest hopes and dreams. Instead, he is the one who uses even his foes to make a point.
The setting for Luke 2 is the first century analog to my backyard. The stage is dressed with rust and decay, guilt and shame, sin and death.
Fred Rogers did not teach children how to live through a pandemic, but he had many profound things to say about loving our neighbors and finding our identity in that calling.
To the extent that God is exclusive by offering salvation only through Christ we can say he is more gracious than other systems because he takes on our guilt upon himself while gifting us his righteousness.