justification on Ash Wednesday

​O my all-merciful God and Lord, Jesus Christ, full of pity: Through Your great love You came down and became incarnate in order to save everyone. O Savior, I ask You to save me by Your grace! If You ...

A prayer for All Saints' Day or the following Sunday. Meant to be prayed in unison. An optional section is provided to make this a confession of sin. Almighty God, we were once helpless and wand...

Pastor: For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised ...

Brothers and Sisters, be reassured. Your sins are not held against you. By the work of God in Christ, you are forgiven. God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the king...

The Lord says, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new sp...

For he grew up before him like a young plant,     and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,     and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised...

Justification is the great exchange: our sin for Christ's righteousness.

We affirm the good news that this saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. He personally bore our sins in His body on the cross, s...

What can we say, O Lord, to justify ourselves? You shower us with grace upon grace. Your mercies are new every morning. And we find it hard to forgive others. Sometimes we are petty and hold grudges f...

Every week I preach justification by faith to my people, because every week they forget it.

The prophet Jeremiah reminds us that when it seems all hope is lost, God is still working toward restoration. Friends, believe the Good News today: through the messiah, the righteous branch, our sins ...

Grace is not only needed for the occasion of conversion, the moment we suddenly (or slowly) come to our senses and realize that we are spiritually bankrupt, having nothing to bring to God and everythi...

As we try to live a life in obedience to God, the stubbornness of our sins can discourage and frighten us. If we are supposed to have a new heart, why are we still so broken? C.S. Lewis struggled with...

Holy God We are holy, Not in the sense of any rightness within us, But because we are in a relationship with you, We are holy because you gift that it is so. We are not called to into a division of us...

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that 'the just shall live by his faith.' Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteo...

If you are ever in the mood to feel overwhelmed, discouraged, and downright depressed, hail a cab to the corner of Avenue of the Americas and West 44th Street in New York City. There, you’ll find the ...

Leader: May we go from here knowing we stand upright before the Father because of Christ’s works and not our own. Go, and serve the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit!

In a way, the Reformation began in one monk's overwhelming guilt. Martin Luther was riddled with guilt and filled with anxiety because he could see that he could not live up to God's standard ...

Let’s talk about how our beliefs shape our actions, especially when fear is involved. You've probably heard the phrase, "ideas have consequences," right? It's easy to see this in act...

One particularly crafty, if not insidious way a “good works” righteousness can seep into our theology is by positioning faith as the pre-eminent work. We must never forget that faith itself is a...

Saving faith is an immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving, resting upon Him alone, for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of God's grace.

My faith life, like that of every one else, fluctuates. There are ups and downs and hot spots and cold spots and boredom and ennui and all the rest can be there. And so I’m not asked on a Sunday morni...

In Isaiah 43:25, God says, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” Here God uses two absolute terms to assure us of the complete removal...

As for Christians, well, we really have just one thing going for us. We have publicly declared… that we are desperately in need of Another to give us his righteousness, to complete us, to live in us. ...

Romans 6 shines a bright spotlight on the dangerous half-truth, currently fashionable, that ‘God accepts us as we are.’ Will ‘God’s acceptance’ do as a complete grounding of Christian ethics? Emphatic...

Justification by faith is the hinge on which all true religion turns.

Faith cannot but pour forth from all creatures in most eager service to God as a dutiful son serves a godly father. The efficacy of faith is such that from its fruits it is very evident in whose heart...

At the beginning to the musical Les Misérables , the lead character Jean Valjean is arrested by the police, with silver he has stolen from a kindly bishop who had given him shelter. Valjean is plainl...

For although faith alone justifies, love is also demanded…. A living faith is that efficacious, burning trust in the mercy of God which never fails to bring forth good fruits.

Introduction In Romans 10 we are encouraged to call upon the Lord. Lest we believe that our returning to God is ultimately a matter of works or our own merit, Paul wants us to see that repentance fi...