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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What we confess concerning a corpse confesses much about how deep, or how shallow, is our understanding of the importance of the incarnation of Jesus, his death, and his (as well as our own) resurrection.
A cemetery is a hard place to confess because the cemetery itself seems to confess, “You, O mortal, have lost.”
The details vary, of course, but we too struggle to repair the heart broken by the tragic death of someone we love. We're dazed, angry, speechless.
But this dying world is still the world of our living God, who graces us with tokens of a final renewal. As leaf subsides to leaf, and frost to snow, and snow to ice, there comes a day when the gold of nature sprouts anew.
For out of the mouths of these opposition forces, gathered on enemy turf, comes the defiant declaration of death’s undoing: “Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!” An audacious act it is, to march smack dab into the middle of a place that screams, “Dead!” and to sing, “Alive!”
On that day the mourners were shocked to discover that behind the veneer of her bright smile lurked a fathomless darkness, whose depths she made manifest only when she despaired of life in this world.
This is the night when the earth is formless and void; and the darkness of blood is over the face of Thy Son. And the Spirit of God moves out of His body as He gives up the Ghost.
Yes, this is a time of cascading trial. The Lord has been very kind to comfort and assure us of His nearness and to open my eyes to new truth from a passage that I thought I understood.
The crowds, bored into silence, had left a vacuum in the tent that my little boy’s voice began to fill. He laughed unaware and uncaring that he alone laughed, deaf to everyone’s else silence.