This is an excerpt from Ditching the Checklist: Assurance of Salvation for Evangelicals (and Other Sinners) by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 5-7.
In the liturgy, Christ is present, self-giving, and ever-addressing his people.
Christians don’t need a bucket list. We’ve got the whole bucket: the Word fulfilled, life fulfilled, and life in full.

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The mind-blowing part of this entire story, though, isn’t that only one leper came back to “give thanks,” but that the Lord Jesus healed all ten knowing full well that only one would come back.
Every incendiary move of God’s Spirit is accompanied by a group of penitent people rediscovering the power and preeminence of God’s Word.
Both now and forever, the bruised and crucified Lord nailed to a cross is our assurance of deliverance.
One of the primary reasons we do not have to fear the future is because the future is certain in Christ.
My words are peanuts compared to the porterhouse of God’s Word.
A group of unassuming apostles was given a graphic illustration of how the Lord would use them to turn the world right-side-up through the upside-down logic of grace.
There is only one antidote to the venom of sin and death: the Savior who becomes the serpent so that every snake-bitten-sinner might live.
To “trust in God in trial” means we fight our battles by kneeling and praying to “the Holy One of Israel,” who works out our deliverance by himself.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
History is the painful realization that we aren’t the ones who can save the world but, rather, we’re the ones who get saved.
The undercurrent of Scripture is the sheer fact that Jehovah God is a God of his word.
There’s no possibility of understanding the grace of Romans 6 and the glory of Romans 8 unless you identify with the excruciating struggle of Romans 7.