Forgiveness from Jesus is always surprising to us.
The Christ who rescues does not wait for you to be clean. He comes to clean you. He does not need your strength. He brings his own.
When you remember your baptism, you're not recalling a ritual. You're standing under a current of divine action that has not ceased to flow since the moment those baptismal waters hit your skin.

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There is no justification except by faith alone. The radical forgiveness itself puts the old to death and calls forth the new.
“Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.”
The Gospels function like literary essays, composed with a specific thesis and purpose in mind. Each account of Jesus’s life acts as a treatise to show us something about the person and work of the Savior.
He is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters, even as we curse and yell at him for not pleasing us with our pettish wishes.
There is a repentance that is anti-repentance, for it clings tightly to the sin over which it sorrows, because in that sorrow is its consolation. In this warped spiritual scheme, our anguish is atonement; shame is our absolution; tears are our baptism. We feel better knowing how bad we feel about our wrongs. But there is a much better way.
In Christ Jesus, through faith, we’ve received everything we need for our bodies and lives, and life eternal.
Jesus’ miracle in this sermon, then, is a type of the compassion He has for your hearers. While they certainly have many physical needs, your hearers also (more fundamentally) need Jesus’ mercy and forgiveness.
He is our gold. He is our pure garment. He is our healing. He is our sanity. He is our wholeness.
Apart from God's word, we will judge the right to be wrong and evil people as good.
God created humanity in his image and then inhabited that image. Not just for 33 years, but for eternity thereafter.
Christ presents to us such liberty, so that we as Christians according to our faith may tolerate no other master, but only hold that we are baptized and called unto Christ, and through him have become justified and sanctified.
Our stories, be they ever so inspiring or worthy of emulation, should never be equated with proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Gospel Jesus Christ commissioned to be proclaimed.