Our faith is founded on the Person of Jesus, who makes present and enacts God’s “goodness” in “set[ting] us free from the bonds of [our] sins.”
This is not a project to make ourselves “worthy” of God’s love by our own power. God loves us already, and so His grace stirs up in us the awareness of our own “distress,” our need for “mercy.” The Holy Spirit moves our hearts to seek Him with confidence in His promises and His goodness.
And He answers our crying out to Him in our distress. He “deliver[s]” us in a manner beyond anything we could have imagined, by dwelling among us and transforming our history through His Son’s salvific sacrifice on the Cross. Our hope for forgiveness is a response to God’s love and mercy revealed and given in Jesus.
United with Him, we find pardon for our sins, and our “weakness” is changed into “space” for His Spirit to give us new life—we live not only in the hope of “eternal life” with God after death, but in the beginnings of that life that takes hold of us even now, giving meaning to our lives in the present moment, empowering us to worship and love God and to love one another.
