What Israel’s story makes painfully obvious is that following the Lord is a lifelong lesson in “I believe, but help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).
Faith holds on to the truth of who Jesus is revealed to be, despite our sometimes incongruent experience with God.
This is an excerpt from the first chapter of A Reasoned Defense of the Faith by Adam Francisco (1517 Publishing, 2026), pgs 1-3.

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Calvary is our mountain of pardon. It is the place which reveals most definitively God’s plan to redeem and reconcile sinners to himself.
God picks the unexpected and the unlikely, and goes to the unforeseen places, stacking the odds against himself, in order that age after age might stand in open-mouthed wonder at his sovereignty in and over all things.
For sinners who cannot seem to get out of their own way, Dane brings to bear the gospel of Christ’s heart, which aerates one’s spiritual lungs with undiluted grace.
The Psalms aren’t the clandestine successes of a faithful soul, but are the journaled hopes of a desperate soul — of one teetering on the edge of oblivion.
Through the often abominable and lamentable and occasional commendable season, there is one who remains unmoved by it all.
But Jesus didn’t see it that way. He saw his arrest not as the kingdom’s program being thwarted but as it being “fulfilled.”
Mankind’s “thoughts and ways” on the matter of pardon and forgiveness do not even come close to exhausting, let alone fathoming, God’s “thoughts and ways.”
Despite what the Pharisees believed and advertised, Jesus was not intent upon deconstructing the fundamental tenets of the Old Testament law. Actually, he proceeds to do just the opposite.
Everyone is living as a naked sufferer who’s been duped into believing that the nakedness of suffering has to be covered up.
If you and I were to examine our own lives, we’d likely have to admit that we are frequent disciples of Jeroboam’s “bootleg religion.”
You and I have a God who pardons all our wrongdoing by taking all of them onto himself. He doesn’t zap us into oblivion at the first sign of rebellion.
What is it, though, that makes bedtime so fraught with anxiety?