The Israelite God was different from all the other gods, thus, the worship of Yahweh differed from that of all other gods.
David finally found the truth that it was not his seed of kingship but the promise made to Abraham that made him holy. From that, David refused to be moved and wrote this Psalm by the necessity of the Spirit as the assurance of faith. The law never made a man holy, not even one as robust as David; yet faith did this great thing without lifting a finger.
Today, the longing for cultural Christianity on both the left and the right hearkens back to an older version of Christendom that was a mixed blessing for the church in the western world. The cultural mediation of Christian views on created order has certainly benefitted the civilization we’ve inherited. But the gospel itself isn’t something that can be reduced to cultural mediation either. Instead, the gospel as a message stands apart from all human accomplishments and achievements, no matter how beneficial they might be.

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If you want to stay out of jail, look to the law. If you want into heaven, look to the promise. If you want to earn a paycheck from your boss, work. If you want to receive salvation from your God, believe.
The throne of grace is always available to us. For the Christian, it isn’t and never will be a throne of judgment. All of the judgment for all of our sin was laid upon our perfect Savior.
Righteousness by yourself is not just hard, it is impossible. It does not come about by your purity, your activity, or your loyalty. It comes through one thing: faith.
We must put away a whitewashed Christianity that says that God simply forgives because He is nice, kind, loving, gentle, etc. That is not how forgiveness works.
The gospel promise is that God in Christ knows exactly what your temptations are and still bids you find protection from them in him.
When Luther's barber, Peter Beskendorf, asked him how to pray, Luther wrote him an open letter that has become a classic expression of the "when, how, and what" of prayer. It is as instructive today as when it was first penned it in 1535.
The devil is to be taken seriously, but we should also not give him more credit or more power than he has after being defanged by Christ’s resurrection.
There has been a blood atonement for sin. Jesus is our propitiation. Jesus has expiated sin. Lent climaxes with this expectation.
This petition is proof that the Christian life is not a practice in perfectionism. Rather, it is a life of dying and rising, lived under the cross of Christ, in the continual forgiveness of our sins.
Jesus does not give as the world gives. With Jesus, everything is guaranteed and has been finished from the start.
The book, Paul and the Resurrection: Testing the Apostolic Testimony, by Josh Pagán, has just been released by 1517 Publishing. In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, Pagán combines the analytic tools of history and philosophy to explore and evaluate competing explanations of Paul's belief in the Resurrection of Jesus. In this article, he introduces us to his book, which is available now on Amazon (see link at close of article).
In the vortex of uncertainty and upheaval, what’s the best thing we can do? Seize the ordinary.