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 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.
I rededicated my life as many times as I could when the guilt was unbearable. I would read my Bible more and pray more, yet I still struggled. I knew deep down, I was breaking God’s heart with my failure at being his child.
New normals are always sneaking up on us. Preachers ignore them to their peril and the peril of our hearers.
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.
The lifeblood of Christ is the treasury that defines personal worth – your worth, my worth. Preach that; the price tag on your soul.
This food, already purchased and freely given in our pericope, is a foretaste of the feast to come as well; the marriage feast of the Lamb in His Kingdom which has no end.
He is our gold. He is our pure garment. He is our healing. He is our sanity. He is our wholeness.
Both Hus and Luther arrived at the same conclusion: neither councils nor the pope had final authority in the church. Headship in the church belongs solely to Christ.
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.
To dwell with a Holy God in their camp, Israel lead holy lives. Anything standing in the way of and threatening this holy relationship must be avoided or eliminated.