Tag: assurance
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God is Good. I Am Not.
God’s positive attitude to you doesn’t depend on you—not even on your faith. So much so that in Our Father, when explaining the request about forgiveness, Martin Luther—the “justified by faith alone” guy—doesn’t even use the word “faith” once! In life, people are so used to conditional relationship and qualified love, that God’s unconditional, unqualified,…
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You Can’t Clear Your Name
You can’t clear your name. But you don’t need to. We live under constant evaluation from others. Socially. Online. At work. In fact, 79% of UK workers experience workplace stress regularly. And 1 in 4 of us feel stressed more days in a month than not. A major aspect of workplace pressure is caused by…
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Every Teaching Claims to Be Ancient—Law and Gospel Actually Is
Catholics point to Mary.Pentecostals point to tongues.Baptists point to decision theology, exclusive to adults. Luther’s most distinctive teaching was the distinction between Law and Gospel. All are justified in Christ. This is received through faith alone. And so the Bible is only rightly understood when we recognise the distinction everywhere between God’s commands and God’s…
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That Heaviness Feels True. It Isn’t.
Some days feel heavy.Everything feels bad—or just flat and pointless.Even small things feel pointless or too much to bear. And in those moments, it doesn’t just feel bad—it feels true. It isn’t. One in five adults in Manchester struggle with their mental health. That matters, because people and their experiences matter. But it also tells…
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Does Allah Love the Wicked?
Muslims and Christians both speak about God—the one who created us.(Allah is simply the Arabic word for “God”.)But what they say about him is very different. We see that very clearly in what their holy books claim is God’s attitude to the wicked. The Qur’an (Surah 3:57):* وَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَعَمِلُوا۟ ٱلصَّـٰلِحَـٰتِ فَيُوَفِّيهِمْ أُجُورَهُمْ ۗ…
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God Is Not Angry with You
You assume God is angry with you and that you need to do something about it. That assumption is the problem. It’s understandable why you think that way: We often feel like God is angry with us.The world often looks as though he’s angry with us.And the Bible often sounds like he’s angry with us.…
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Life’s Unjust. God Isn’t.
Life is not fair. The strong win. Lies succeed. And things often don’t work out the way they should. God does not promise to fix the injustices of life in the present. Those that claim he always will are preaching a “theology of glory”—but God is not revealed in power, but in Jesus dying on…
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I Did Everything Right—Why Am I Still Broke?
37% of kids in Manchester live in poverty. Recent data revealed that 9,589—that’s 1 in 61 people—in Manchester are homeless. Of that figure, 4,678 are children. In 2019, Manchester ranked 6 out of 326 local authorities in England, where 1 is the most deprived. My family and I moved onto a council estate right on…