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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Where Erasmus saw fear and collapse, Luther saw the never-ending comfort of Christ and his gospel.
If the resurrection were just a repetition of this world, then it would be ridiculous, indeed. But the resurrection is different. It is a world without death.
When we hear freedom, we have to ask about its opposite, bondage.
The devil knows our name and labels us by our sin. The devil breathes out death as he names us for what we are, sinners.
On All Saints Day, the beatitudes remind us how God in Christ claims people, frail, humble, poor, mourning, and makes them His own.
Any conception that contends that Jesus only died for some sinners turns the gospel into an uncertain message for everyone.
Faithful celebration of the Reformation is possible only for those who understand they have nothing. Whose incapability and insufficiency are obvious and owned. Who recognize their dependence on God for all things. In other words, Reformation is for children.
If the gospel is promise that means it is essentially relational. It stands that the nature of any promise is that it's only as good as the one who issues it.
Jesus is a heroic warrior that not even hell can defeat.
Terror and even hatred of God are the only things with which divine hiddenness can leave us.
Are people so different today? Is justification really irrelevant now? Is the preacher’s only point of contact with the life-giving Gospel a by-product of Microsoft’s word processor? I do not think so.
I suggest preaching a sermon that directs attention away from the main characters. Instead, highlight for your hearers (and proclaim loudly and clearly) the promise of Jesus in this text.