Alligood is at pains to stress that glorification is not the result of our own efforts any more than sanctification or justification.
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.

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The Old Testament often seems like a long lost family--and a rather weird family, at that. How can followers of the Messiah today live our heritage in the Torah, Prophets, and Writings? Here are three simple suggestions.
Certainly, the people of Israel are being stubborn, unfaithful and untrusting but one may wonder if this issue is a deeper one. Are they afraid?
We were enemies, but because of the self-sacrificing love of Christ, we are made friends, indeed, even the adopted children of our Heavenly Father.
Jesus sits by the well as a shepherd, coming to offer this woman a life-giving stream.
The Church is called to be counter-cultural, to stand out in order that the world might see and hear the truth and be brought into the Kingdom.
Paul says he would inherit the entire world, not merely a little plot of land between Egypt and Syria. This is what God is after in the Messiah: All people and the entire Earth.
What the law is powerless to do, Jesus accomplishes for us. Jesus delivers what the law demands.
We all share a common hope. The same hope that converted Augustine, drove Martin Luther out of the monastery and calls horrible sinners to new life every day.
But this is not a story of Jesus being taken many places. This is a story of Jesus remaining in one place and deepening in His love of the Spirit and the Father.
The main point Paul has been getting at in Romans is what God has done in the One man Jesus the Messiah—the rightful heir of God’s earthly kingdom—is far, far more than simply putting the human race back where it was before the intrusion of sin.
The Seed of the woman is he who will crush the head of the evil one and restore man to a right and proper relationship with God.
This article is the second installment in an eight-part series inspired by the Lenten themes of catechesis, prayer, and repentance found in the Lord’s Prayer as Luther taught it in his Small Catechism.