God Wants You Joyous and Confident

You should learn that God does not want you to be sad and frightened but joyous and confident in view of the certain and positive promise of His grace which is proclaimed to you by the Holy Spirit Himself. And He tells you that what you feel in your heart and imagine about the wrath and punishment of an ungracious God, who could damn you to hell, is not the truth but your erroneous, foolish notion and a deception of the devil.

Therefore let the Word and command of God be and mean more to you than your own feeling and the judgment of all the world, lest you charge God with lying and deprive yourself of the Spirit of Truth.

Source: Quoted in Ewald M. Plass, What Luther Says, A Practical In-home Theology for the Active Christian. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House. 1959 Edition, 10th Printing (1994), p. 512