Jesus dove into the waters of baptism, plunging into our deepest need to rescue us.
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.

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Divine election hacking happens with the proposal that God’s Word is irrelevant and powerless, weak and impotent.
The salvation of wretched sinners by an omni-holy and forever-righteous God is, by all accounts, a categorical impossibility.
Thank God for heroes: they inspire us to be better, to help others, to live and work for the good of our race. And thank God for villains, too: they incarnate our shadow side, our nocturnal soul, the dragon within us that must incessantly have its throat slit on the altar of repentance.
Consolation is the breath of life filling our lungs, hearts, and minds with the fresh, incorruptible air of the new creation.
Since Adam, we are all illegal and undocumented aliens in God’s country.
What do Habakkuk and Israel have? Nothing but the word of God. Nothing but the promise of God. Nothing but God himself. They have the vision that Yahweh gives, the words of hope he utters. And that, amazingly, is enough.
Perhaps the answer to creating a healthier church and a more invested people is found in preaching more clearly the full freeing Gospel.
What do you think of when you hear the term “self-esteem”?
It’s by no means an ivory-tower theological question. It’s as real as the weight we’ve lost from the stress of our divorce. As real as the bottle of antidepressants on our nightstand. We believe in him. We love him. But every voice inside us and every shred of evidence outside us points to his abandonment of us in our hour of deepest need.
The devil isn’t a popular subject nowadays. The argument is made that we’ve progressed as a culture.
The biblical response to suffering, to recognizing that things are not as they ought to be, is lament.
In the last two decades U.S. Americans have given way to fear of many things: economic decline, loss of values, limits on our personal rights, to name a few. Too many of us live with some sense of threat and menace hanging over our heads and haunting our hearts.