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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Ultimately the Christian life isn't about progress, it's about promise--the Pilgrim's Promise.
He is no sweet and sappy, romanticized and Disneyfied, cartoonish Christ. He is ferocious, free, untamed, and heaven-bent on not leaving the battlefield until the war is won and he makes his enemies a footstool for his feet.
Faith is a gift from God. It’s not flashy or boast-worthy. It’s total dependency on the God who saves utter fools.
God’s will is not sparkly, flashy, exciting, extraordinary plans for your life—at least not in the Old Adam’s eyes. So, what is the will of God?
The implications were clear: Jesus’ death destroyed the things that distinguished people as educated or uneducated, rich or poor, free or enslaved, black or white, pious or godless.
Virtue, like all good things, can easily be weaponized. And not only can, but constantly is. Indeed, I would argue that, for churchgoing, rule-following, tradition-honoring, morality-applauding people, virtue often becomes the cancer that we deem a badge of honor.
The Church gathers around the Word and Sacrament in order to receive Christ and each other.
His resurrection reveals that Jonah, and all of us, even the evilest people, are salvageable, even from suicide, in Jesus' death and resurrection.
They were righteous, but they were righteous because God declared it so. Just like us.
It would do us well to expand what we mean when we say catechesis and consequently broaden the reach of theological education into daily life.
I venture to assert I have never read, in the entire Scriptures, words more beautifully expressive of the grace of God than these two children words.
The easiest way for us to contend with our sin is to become an agent of sin. We slice and cut others to pieces for all the world to see.