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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Assurance of salvation may be the single greatest struggle people have confessed to me. It isn't surprising.
The Church of Jesus Christ is and stays Jesus' Church whether we decide it is or not.
The miracle of Pentecost is not obvious; it is the miracle of faith created through the preaching of the word of the cross.
If we get past Sunday School moralizing what do we discover in the Old Testament?
There in that moment, the waters of baptism reached down deep into the forsaken path of the grave with a man whose body and mind could no longer hold onto any reality otherwise.
Some lie and tell us that to sin is to be ourselves. But it is not. Sin is not natural to humanity.
Jesus is the end of religion.
God’s Law is a death sentence for us sinners. There is no winning beneath the Law of God.
The Gospel predominates when hearers receive the saving gifts of Christ as God’s final word to them.
In Martin Luther's Small Catechism he borrows a line from St. Augustine about what defines a "god."
Whatever we call “god,” how we act out our “religion,” what we call “living,” if its name isn’t Jesus, it’s a sham.
We are called to proclaim the life, death, and resurrection of the Answer incarnate, Jesus Christ, and in love respond to the questions that inevitably arise against it.