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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In Scripture, laments are raw expressions of grief, but they always point to hope. What if our culture’s obsession with holiday lights is an unconscious way of crying out, “We need good news, and we need it now”?
This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Junk Drawer Jesus written by Matt Popovits (1517 Publishing, 2024). Available today!
Jesus came for little children, and that is what we are. We are children of God.
In the Bible, we meet the God who also does not prance around naked as a jaybird.
As both law and gospel are proclaimed, judgment and deliverance are miraculously pronounced over the hearer.
A miracle happened right before our very eyes.
God chose Russell Brand, chose to defy his fast-escaping life and drink up all his swift-running sin in the River Thames.
Like the serpent on the pole, God still puts real-life things up for us to look to for salvation.
Bathed in the waters of baptism, you are placed in God's path of totality, a path he won for each and every one of us.
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.
The seemingly small, the particular, the previously overlooked, magnifies in importance.
When we believe in Jesus as the true and better fulfillment of every promise made to Abraham, we, too, are counted as righteous in the same way that he was — by faith.