For You: Where God Hands Over Forgiveness: Baptism, Absolution, the Lord's Supper, and Preached Word

You have a habit you probably do not think of as a habit.Somewhere in the first few minutes of being awake, you take a reading on where you stand with God - the way you might step outside and look at the sky. Some mornings it comes back clear. Some mornings you already know before your feet hit the floor.Most of us were handed one of two places to look for that answer. The first is a decision behind us: a night at a camp, an aisle, a prayer in a side room, a date somebody wrote in the front of a Bible. The second is the evidence in front of us - growth, victory, the trajectory of the line. Both fail, and they fail in opposite directions. The decision is over and unverifiable. The fruit is never over, and can be audited every morning of your life.Both point you inward. And that is why the verdict changes daily.For You makes a different claim, and it is the claim the Christian church has made for most of its history: that God did not leave the forgiveness of sins floating in the air to be captured by whoever is sincere enough to grab it. He put it somewhere. He attached it to specific, physical, findable things - and he did it so you would have somewhere to go on the mornings when the reading comes back bad.Working from a short passage in the Smalcald Articles where Luther names five ways God gives help against sin, the book walks through each of them in plain language: the Word preached into your ears, baptism with a date attached to it, private absolution spoken to your face by a man under orders, the body and blood placed in your hand, and the mutual consolation of ordinary Christians - the last of which almost nobody has ever heard preached.Along the way it takes the honest objections seriously. What if the preaching is bad? What if I am not fit to come to the table? What if I do all of this and feel nothing at all? What if this is just ritual, or magic, or a church inserting itself between me and God?Larry Herzog Jr. is a layman who came to the faith from outside it and remembers what it was like not to have any of this. He is the author of The Altar Call, the Anxious Bench, and the Empty Pew, to which this book is a companion - the first names where assurance is not, and this one walks through where it is.An appendix prints the four confessional texts the book works from, complete, so you can check the argument against its sources. A free discussion guide for adult classes and small groups is available at larryherzogjr.com .