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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Christ is joy and sweetness to a broken heart. Christ is a lover of poor sinners, and such a lover that He gave Himself for us.
The image of the cross stands as central to Luther’s comfort for those who endure persecution.
Unlike any mortal legal representative, our divine Attorney does not perform an inquiry to ensure our case is worth taking. He secures no retainer from us prior to advocating for our vindication.
We are meant to serve in love both our neighbor in need as well as the neighbor who doesn’t think they need us.
When Revelation’s words read against their original context, old meaning and new meaning are simultaneously brought to light as language and imagery is translated from the Old Testament to the New.
God will keep his promises, but how he keeps them is often quite surprising.
We must also remember that our enemy is a creature of God. He is someone for whom Christ Jesus died. He is a sinner just like any other, no more or less selfish than us.
The biggest point Luther makes about the descent is not that Jesus triumphed over hell idle and unaffected, but that Jesus defeated hell by suffering hell away.
It is through the locatedness of the Church that one anchors faith in Christ and the sure hope we are not alone, and God is for us and with us through Jesus.
We are free to be in the world, but not of the world. We are freed to stop treating the pursuit of pleasure as an escape from pain, suffering, and death.
The Psalms do anything but present a sugar-coated presentation of the Christian life. In fact, they are decidedly real about the missed expectations we face so often.
In the middle of the spring, on a run-of-the-mill Thursday, the ascension interrupts the mundane to herald the extraordinary: Christ is in charge and is present on earth as he is in heaven, guiding history for the sake of his church.