In Others Words

Build on what's strong, great, holy, and gracious

2012-01-21T15:50:00.001-05:00

The great gospel imperatives to holiness are ever rooted in indicatives of grace that are able to sustain the weight of those imperatives. The Apostles do not make the mistake that’s often made in Christian ministry. [For the Apostles] the indicatives are more powerful than the imperatives in gospel preaching. So often in our preaching our indicatives are not strong enough, great enough, holy enough, or gracious enough to sustain the power of the imperatives.

...We’ve seen our own failure and we’ve seen the imperatives to holiness and we’ve lost sight of the great indicatives of the gospel that sustain those imperatives. … Woven into the warp and woof of the New Testament’s exposition of what it means for us to be holy is the great groundwork that the self-existent, thrice holy, triune God has — in Himself, by Himself and for Himself — committed Himself and all three Persons of His being to bringing about the holiness of His own people. This is the Father’s purpose, the Son’s purchase and the Spirit’s ministry.

- Sinclair Ferguson, message from the 2007 Banner of Truth Conference,
Our Holiness: The Father’s Purpose and the Son’s Purchase.

Putting the Promise in Perspective

2012-01-17T22:53:00.000-05:00

An expression which grated on my ear the other evening from the lips of a certain good man ran something in this fashion: ‘There is a Heaven prepared for all of you, but if you are not faithful you will not win it. There is a crown in Heaven laid up for you, but if you are not faithful it will be without a wearer.’

I do not believe it. I cannot believe it. That the crown of Eternal Life, which is laid up for the blessed of the Father will ever be given to anybody else or left without a possessor, I do not believe. I dare not conceive of crowns in Heaven and nobody to wear them. Do you think that in Heaven, when the whole number of saints is complete, you will find a number of unused crowns?

‘Ah, what are these for? Where are the heads for these?’ ‘They are in Hell.’ Then, Brother, I have no particular desire to be in Heaven. If all the family of Christ are not there, my soul will be wretched and forlorn because of their sad loss, because I am in union with them all. If one son that believed in Jesus does not get there I shall lose respect for the promise and respect for the Master, too. He must keep His word to every soul that rests on Him.

— Charles Spurgeon
"The Reward of the Righteous"

I know that I am a child of God because...

2012-01-14T09:15:00.001-05:00

We can put it this way: the man who has faith is the man who is no longer looking at himself and no longer looking to himself. He no longer looks at anything he once was. He does not look at what he is now. He does not even look at what he hopes to be as the result of his own efforts. He looks entirely to the Lord Jesus Christ and His finished work, and rests on that alone. He has ceased to say, “Ah yes, I used to commit terrible sins but I have done this and that.” He stops saying that. If he goes on saying that, he has not got faith. Faith speaks in an entirely different manner and makes a man say, “Yes I have sinned grievously, I have lived a life of sin, yet I know that I am a child of God because I am not resting on any righteousness of my own; my righteousness is in Jesus Christ and God has put that to my account.

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Our decision for God vs His decision for us

2012-01-04T23:01:00.011-05:00

This past Sunday at church, during the sermon, I listened to the following words:

"The writing is on the wall dear unbeliever. You've been weighed. You've been measured. And you've been found wanting. And judgement is coming, and it is certain if you continue to stand outside of Christ.

I plead with you...

to let go of your idols,
to let go of your pride,
to let go of your self consumption,
to let go of your obsession with material things. (with money, clothes and stuff).

(Is your stuff worthy of eternity in hell? Does it mean that much to you?)

Let go of your reputation.
Lose your life for Christ's sake.

...Some of you have been in this church for ten years or more. And you still haven't bent the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ. What are you waiting for? It's January 1st. Are you going to go another whole year standing outside, looking in through the windows? Why would you do that? Why would you be so cruel to your soul?"

After you read these words, I invite you to ask, for yourself and yourself alone, two questions:

1. To what extent do these words plead with those who are dead in their trespasses and sins to summon their resources and make a decision for God?

2. To what extent does the Gospel plead with those who are dead in their trespasses and sins to abandon all of their resources and receive the decision that God made for them?

Lastly, snippets from John Piper talking about the nature of faith (< 3 min.):

If we seek, there's but one place to look

2011-12-31T10:09:00.001-05:00

If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is “of him”.
If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing.
If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion;
....if purity, in his conception;
....if gentleness, it appears in his birth.
(For by his birth he was made like us in all respects that he might learn to feel our pain.)

If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion;
....if acquittal, in his condemnation;
....if remission of the curse, in his cross;
....if satisfaction, in his sacrifice;
....if purification, in his blood,
....if reconciliation, in his descent into hell;
....if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb;
....if newness of life, in his resurrection;
....if immortality, in the same;
....if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven;
....if protection,
....if security,
....if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom;
....if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given him to judge.

In short, since rich store of every kind of goods abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.

--John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.16.19

The Direction of Mankind's fall is UPWARD

2011-12-30T09:15:00.000-05:00

Adam and Eve fell into sin. [But] the "fall" is really not what the word implies at all. It is not a downward plunge to some lower rung on the ladder of morality and freedom. Rather it is an upward rebellion, an invasion of the realm of things “above,” the usurping of divine prerogative. To retain traditional language, one would have to resort to an oxymoron and speak of an “upward fall.”

This, after all, is precisely what the temptation by the serpent in the garden implies: “You will not die… you will be like God, knowing good and evil”

A line had been drawn over which Adam and Eve were not to step. They were not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. There was a realm “above” which they were to leave to God; if they did not, their death would result.

--Gerhard Forde, "Theology is for Proclamation"

The first Adam ventured up into the “realm of things above” and brought death. The second Adam ventured down into the “realm of things below” and brought life.

--Tullian Tchividjian

The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.

--John Stott

Dependence is our blind spot

2011-12-23T21:09:00.002-05:00

God's work begins when ours comes to its end.

Sometimes His presence is not felt with power through our methods however useful they may be, especially when we are confident we have the right approach and insights. God has a way of wanting to be God and refusing to get too involved where we have our own wisdom and strength. Then when we run out of wisdom and strength, He is suddenly present, a lesson I find myself relearning practically every day that I am in my right mind. (On my crazy days I am not ready to learn much!)

I think He wants our confidence to be exclusively in Him, and when we lose our self-confidence then He moves in to show what He can do. Perhaps self-dependence--and forgetting the strength to be found in Christ-dependence--is always our biggest blind spot. There is also presumption and pride that go with self-reliance.

So let's not lose our trust in God and the power of His gospel and the spirit of praise which goes with its proclamation (Rom 15:13; 1 Cor 1:18, 22-25; Gal 6:14).

--Jack Miller
(The Heart of a Servant Leader: Letters from Jack Miller (P&R, 2004), 200-201)

God-centered

2011-12-23T10:10:00.000-05:00

Jesus is quite aware of the Father’s personal presence and direction in his own life (John 5:19). From Jesus’s life we see a model of what it looks like to be God-centered. Jesus doesn’t pull out his platinum God card, borrowing power or strength to cope his way through temptations sinlessly; he lives within the limited equity of a human life bound by dependence upon God as his loving Father.

— Bill Clem
Disciple: Getting Your Identity from Jesus, p 43

An un-fragmented soul

2011-11-23T22:48:00.000-05:00

This is the key to finding rest in your suffering. There is only one way in which rest is to be found: to let God rule in everything. Whatever else you might come to learn only pertains to how God has willed to rule. But as soon as unrest begins, the cause for it is due to your unwillingness to obey, your unwillingness to surrender yourself to God.

When there is suffering, but also obedience in suffering, then you are being educated for eternity. Then there will be no impatient hankering in your soul, no restlessness, neither of sin nor of sorrow. If you will but let it, suffering is the guardian angel who keeps you from slipping out into the fragmentariness of the world; the fragmentariness that seeks to rip apart the soul.

-Søren Kierkegaard

Not according to our nature at all

2011-11-20T09:10:00.000-05:00

If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all, it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer (Nashville, 2010), page 137.

The gospel in four words

2011-11-12T08:15:00.000-05:00

‘Come unto me,’ he says, ‘and I will give you.’ You say, ‘Lord, I cannot give you anything.’ He does not want anything. Come to Jesus, and he says, ‘I will give you.’ Not what you give to God, but what he gives to you, will be your salvation. ‘I will give you‘ — that is the gospel in four words.

Will you come and have it? It lies open before you.

C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), I:175.

The gospel teaches us how to spell

2011-11-05T11:41:00.001-04:00

I have known some that, at first conversion, have not been very clear in the gospel... They could not spell the word 'grace.' They began with a G, but they very soon went on with an F, till it spelt very like 'freewill' before they had done with it.

But after they have learned their weakness, after they have fallen into serious fault, and God has restored them, or after they have passed through deep depression of mind, they have sung a new song. In the school of repentance they have learned to spell. They began to write the word 'free,' but they went on from free, not to 'will' but to 'grace.' And there it stood in capitals, 'FREE GRACE'. . . . They became clearer in their divinity, and truer in their faith than ever they were before.

-- Charles Spurgeon,
quoted in Iaian Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon (Banner of Truth 1966), 69-70

It is not faith that saves us

2011-10-21T23:11:00.000-04:00

Faith is nothing but the instrument of our salvation. Nowhere in Scripture will you find that we are justified because of our faith; nowhere in Scripture will you find that we are justified on account of our faith. The Scripture never says that. The Scripture says that we are justified by faith or through faith. Faith is nothing but the instrument or the channel by which this righteousness of God in Christ becomes ours.

It is not faith that saves us. What saves us is the Lord Jesus Christ and His perfect work. It is the death of Christ upon Calvary's cross that saves us. It is His perfect life that saves us. It is His appearing on our behalf in the presence of God that saves us. It is God putting Christ's righteousness to our account that saves us. This is the righteousness that saves; faith is but the channel and the instrument by which His righteousness becomes mine. The righteousness is entirely Christ's. My faith is not my righteousness and I must never define or think of faith as righteousness. Faith is nothing but that which links us to the Lord Jesus Christ and His righteousness.

-Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Something that God has done

2011-10-12T20:35:00.000-04:00

The gospel transforms us in heart, mind, will, and actions precisely because it is not itself a message about our transformation. Nothing that I am or that I feel, choose, or do qualifies as Good News. On my best days, my experience of transformation is weak, but the gospel is an announcement of a certain state of affairs that exists because of something in God, not something in me; something that God has done, not something that I have done; the love in God’s heart which he has shown in his Son, not the love in my heart that I exhibit in my relationships.

...In fact, our sanctification is simply a lifelong process of letting that Good News sink in and responding appropriately; becoming the people whom God says that we already are in Christ.

- Michael Horton
The Gospel-Driven Life
(Grand Rapids, Mi.: Baker Books, 2009), 77

Only in the old, old way

2011-10-09T10:37:00.001-04:00

If you want health for your souls, and if you want to be the instruments of bringing health to others, do not turn your gaze forever within, as though you could find Christ there. Nay, turn your gaze away from your own miserable experiences, away from your own sin, to the Lord Jesus Christ as He is offered to us in the gospel.

...

It is the same old story, my friends-- the same old story of the natural man. Men are trying today, as they have always been trying, to save themselves-- to save themselves by their own act of surrender, by the excellence of their own faith, by mystic experiences of their own lives. But it is all in vain. Not that way is peace with God to be obtained. It is to be obtained only in the old, old way - by attention to something that was done once for all long ago, and by acceptance of the living Savior who there, once for all, brought redemption for our sin. Oh, that men would turn for salvation from their own experience to the Cross of Christ; oh, that they would turn from the phenomena of religion to the living God!

-- J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937)
from: The Importance of Christian Scholarship in The Defense of The Faith

The way of trust

2011-10-07T23:02:00.000-04:00

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it as his presence and his promise.

— Brennan Manning (Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God)

Effectually, Particularly, and Perfectly

2011-10-05T22:07:00.003-04:00

Should we say “Christ died so that sinners might come to him”? Or, “Christ died for sinners”? There’s a big difference. Did Christ’s work on the cross make it possible for sinners to come to God? Or did Christ’s work on the cross actually reconcile sinners to God? In other words, does the death of Jesus Christ make us save-able or does it make us saved?

...

Certainly, we need to come to Christ in faith. But faith is not the last work that finally makes us saved. Faith is trusting that Jesus has in fact died in our place and bore the curse for us—effectually, particularly, and perfectly.

...

Christ does not come to us merely saying, “I’ve done my part. I laid down my life for everyone because I have saving love for everyone in the whole world. Now, if you would only believe and come to me I can save you.” Instead he says to us, “I was pierced for your transgressions. I was crushed for your iniquities (Isa. 53:5). I have purchased with my blood men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation (Rev. 5:9). I myself bore your sins in my body on the tree, so that you might infallibly die to sins and assuredly live for righteousness. For my wounds did not merely make healing available. They healed you (1 Peter 2:24).”

--Kevin DeYoung
Excerpts from chapter 15 of "The Good News We Almost Forgot"
source: here

The hard work we're called to

2011-10-01T12:31:00.000-04:00

I used to think that when the Apostle Paul tells us to work out our salvation, it meant go out and get what you don’t have—get more patience, get more strength, get more joy, get more love, and so on. But after reading the Bible more carefully, I now understand that Christian growth does not happen by working hard to get something you don’t have. Rather, Christian growth happens by working hard to daily swim in the reality of what you do have. Believing again and again the gospel of God’s free justifying grace everyday is the hard work we’re called to.

This means that real change happens only as we continuously rediscover the gospel. The progress of the Christian life is “not our movement toward the goal; it’s the movement of the goal on us.” Sanctification involves God’s attack on our unbelief—our self-centered refusal to believe that God’s approval of us in Christ is full and final. It happens as we daily receive and rest in our unconditional justification.

...Our main problem in the Christian life is not that we don’t try hard enough to be good, but that we haven’t believed the gospel and received its finished reality into all parts of our life.

--Tullian Tchividjian

Source: here

The one who holds the future cares

2011-09-19T19:40:00.000-04:00

If we can once again look to the cross and grasp the height and depth of the love of God for us in Jesus, then how can we doubt his desire to give us everything necessary for life and godliness? If we feel the smile of the Father’s favor toward us in Christ, in spite of our history of sin and failure, then we will be encouraged to step out again in faith. We will still not know what the future holds, yet if we know that the one who holds the future cares for us, that first step upward on the long road back to obedience becomes possible again.

— Iain Duguid
Esther and Ruth
(Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2005), 157-158

Sanctification means this...

2011-09-11T14:26:00.000-04:00

We have been united with him in a death like his . . . .
Our old self was crucified with him . . . .
One who has died has been set free from sin.
(Romans 6:5-7)

We miss the radical nature of Paul’s teaching here to our great loss. So startling is it that we need to find a startling manner of expressing it. For what Paul is saying is that sanctification means this: in relationship both to sin and to God, the determining factor of my existence is no longer my past. It is Christ’s past.

-Sinclair B. Ferguson,
“The Reformed View,” in Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification,
edited by Donald L. Alexander (Downers Grove, 1988), page 57.

Remember who canceled our sin

2011-08-28T07:08:00.001-04:00

"Sin is not canceled by lawful living."

--Martin Luther

The real fig leaves that hide us from God

2011-08-20T09:43:00.000-04:00

Our best duties are as so many splendid sins. Before you can know you are at peace with God, you must not only be made sick of your original and actual sin, but you must be sick of your righteousness, of all your duties and performances. There must be a deep conviction before you can be brought out of your self-righteousness; it is the last idol taken out of your heart.

...as Adam and Eve hid themselves among the trees of the garden, and sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness, so the poor sinner, when awakened, flies to his duties and to his performances, to hide himself from God, and goes to patch up a righteousness of his own. Says he, "I will be mighty good now — I will reform — I will do all I can; and then certainly Jesus Christ will have mercy on me."

But before you can know you are at peace with God you must be brought to see that God may damn you for the best prayer you ever put up; you must be brought to see that all your duties — all your righteousness ... are so far from recommending you to God, are so far from being any motive and inducement to God to have mercy on your poor soul, that he will see them to be filthy rags.

-George Whitefield
Snippets taken from his Sermon, "The Method of Grace"

Come each day with nothing in my hands

2011-08-18T22:44:00.000-04:00

The gate of Mercy is opened, and over the door it is written:

"This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners."

Between that word 'save' and the next word 'sinners', there is no adjective. It does not say, 'penitent sinners', 'awakened sinners', 'sensible sinners', 'grieving sinners' or 'alarmed sinners'. No, it only says, 'sinners'. And I know this, that when I come, (and it is as much a necessity of my life to come to the cross of Christ today as it was to come ten years ago) — when I come to him, I dare not come as a conscious sinner or an awakened sinner, but I have to come still as a sinner with nothing in my hands.

-Charles Haddon Spurgeon,
preaching on John 3:18, 17 February 1861.

Repentance

2011-08-13T10:43:00.000-04:00

Repentance is not so much a doing as a depending. It is not so much a striving for pardon as a posture of humility. In true repentance we confess our total reliance on God's mercy. We acknowledge the inadequacy of anything we would offer God to gain his pardon. In true repentance we rest upon God's grace rather than trying to do anything to deserve it. Reliance on God alone for mercy is the essence of repentance. Repentance is not a work of turning to new behaviors or to any conjured phrases or emotions in us. Such human efforts cannot be our basis for being made right with God. Repentance is not a turning from one category of works to another; rather it is a turning from human works entirely to God. New obedience follows true repentance, but we put no hope for pardon in what we do.

-Bryan Chapell, Holiness By Grace

Something Better

2011-07-16T08:10:00.005-04:00

I never used to be afraid. I was all faith.

Or so I thought.

...

What I feared most was being forgotten. I was afraid to live an insignificant life.

...

During one weekend away spent in whitespace, I decided to share my list of disappointments with God. After writing pages and pages of unanswerable dilemmas, God gently and lovingly brought two pictures to my mind:

* In the beginning, there was nothing.

It was in nothing, the Holy Spirit hovered, where God created something.

* Mary’s empty womb. How can this be? she asked.

It was in nothing, the Holy Spirit hovered again, where Jesus became flesh.

...

Nothingness. That’s me! I had never been so happy to discover I had become the perfect place for Jesus to rest in.

...

It irrevocably changed my direction. I decided to stop setting my sights on where I was going or what I would end up doing in the future. I set my sights on who I was walking with — Jesus.

...

I realized the best life — the most significant life I can live — is the one I grow in my faith.

...

In the Old Testament, the patriarchs of faith recognized God’s blessings by taking possession of a physical Promised Land. God’s presence was symbolized by physical blessings of harvest and goods.

This all changed after Jesus arrived in the New Testament. The author of Hebrews tells God prepared a spiritual blessing – something better.

“And all these [patriarchs of faith listed earlier],
having gained approval through their faith,
did not receive what was promised,
because God had provided something better for us…

fixing our eyes on Jesus,
the author and perfecter of faith”
Hebrews 11:39-12:2

Our something better isn’t a plan.
Our something better is a Person.

Our spiritual Promised Land is life with Jesus.

-Bonnie Gray
Snippets from a worthwhile post: here

Oh Come All Ye ... guilty

2011-07-10T14:58:00.001-04:00

“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28

One is struck with the personality of this text. There are two persons in it, ‘you’ and ‘me.’ ... Jesus says, ‘Come to me, not to anybody else but to me.’ He does not say, ‘Come to hear a sermon about me’ but ‘Come to me, to my work and person.’ You will observe that no one is put between you and Christ. ... Come to Jesus directly, even to Jesus himself. You do want a mediator between yourselves and God, but you do not want a mediator between yourselves and Jesus. ... To him we may look at once, with unveiled face, guilty as we are. To him we may come, just as we are, without anyone to recommend us or plead for us or make a bridge for us to Jesus. ... You, as you are, are to come to Christ as he is, and the promise is that on your coming to him he will give you rest. That is the assurance of Jesus himself, and there is no deception in it. ... You see there are two persons. Let everybody else vanish, and let these two be left alone, to transact heavenly business with each other.

C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), I:171.

Biblical application...

2011-07-03T16:06:00.001-04:00

The Bible is the word of God by virtue of its relationship to Christ and not by virtue of its spiritual application to our lives... Any attempt to relate a text directly to us or our contemporary hearers without inquiring into its primary relationship to Christ is fraught with danger. The only thing that controls the matter of the relationship of the text to us is its prior relationship to Christ.

Graham Goldsworthy,
Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, p. 113

He offers ... Himself

2011-06-25T12:59:00.001-04:00

Christ is not offered us merely as a Savior who does something for us, but he is offered us as Someone who, having done something for us, is himself the propitiation [Romans 3:25]. . . .

It is not as if Christ handed you something and said, ‘Here is your redemption, here is your forgiveness,’ and then ran away, as a messenger hands a gift in at the door and the door shuts and away goes the messenger; he has done his job. Not a bit of it! It is Christ himself, the Worker, who comes to us himself. It is Christ personally who is our salvation. . . . It is Christ himself, personally, who comes to us with all the efficacy, the fruit of what he has done, and is the propitiation for our sin.

William Still, The World Of Grace, page 96.

Sunday Snippet: Our rescue is objective

2011-06-19T11:45:00.001-04:00

The Sunday Snippet: A talk worth sharing edited to 3 minutes or less.

Tullian Tchividjian wraps up a sermon series on the book of James:

My Snippets (<3 min.):

The entire sermon can be found: here

Sunday Snippet: Repentance

2011-06-12T13:10:00.003-04:00

The Sunday Snippet: A talk worth sharing edited to 3 minutes or less.

Bryan Chapell talks about repentance:

My Snippets (<3 min.):

Entire Talk (26 min.):

Measuring yourself in Him

2011-06-11T09:31:00.000-04:00

The measure of our new self in Christ—the renewed mind—is the degree to which we look away from ourselves to Christ as our treasure. If Christ is more to you, you are more. If Christ is less to you, you are less. Your measure rises and falls with your measure of him. Your valuing him is the value that you have. Your esteeming him is the esteem that you have. Your treasuring him is the treasure that you are.

— John Piper
"Assessing Ourselves with Our God-Assigned Measure of Faith, Part 2"

We are made holy ... how?

2011-06-04T08:20:00.001-04:00

A man may be brought, by reason and conscience, to change his conduct, but not to change his heart. A sense of duty may force him to give alms to a man he hates, but it cannot change hatred into love. The desire of happiness may induce him to engage externally in the service of God, but it cannot make that service a delight. The affections do not obey the dictates of reason, nor the commands of conscience. They may be measurably restrained in their manifestation, but cannot be changed in their nature. . . .

The Scriptures teach us a different doctrine. They teach that believers are so united to Christ, that they are not only partakers of the merit of his death, but also of his Holy Spirit, which dwells in them as a principle of life, bringing them more and more into conformity with the image of God. . . .

The doctrine of sanctification, therefore, as taught in the Bible is, that we are made holy not by the force of conscience, nor of moral motives, nor by acts of discipline, but by being united to Christ so as to become reconciled to God, and partakers of the Holy Ghost. Christ is made unto us sanctification as well as justification.

--Charles Hodge
The Way of Life (1869), 321-25

In order to let you know...

2011-06-02T12:56:00.001-04:00

Like Abraham, you must never look at yourself again, and at all that is so true of you. You are justified in spite of all that; it is what God has done in Christ. Look to that, rest on that, be confident in that. Hold up your head with boldness; yea, I say it with reverence, go even into the presence of God with ‘holy boldness’ and in ‘the full assurance of faith’; not boldness in yourself, but in your Mediator, in your great High Priest, in the One whom God raised from the dead in order to let you know that your sins were dealt with at the Cross once and for ever, and that He looks upon you as His dear child.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans, p. 250

But when I found God so kind

2011-05-29T09:01:00.000-04:00

While I regarded God as a tyrant I thought my sin a trifle; But when I knew Him to be my Father, then I mourned that I could ever have kicked against Him. When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast to think that I could ever have rebelled against One who loved me so, and sought my good.

-C.H. Spurgeon

A New Identity

2011-05-28T08:42:00.000-04:00

There is no antithesis between faith and works. Humans cannot live without acting. You cannot be without doing. You will, in other words, work. The question is merely from which identity will you work.

--Clyde Snodgrass

Sonship first

2011-04-28T12:05:00.000-04:00

It is not imitation that makes sons; it is sonship that makes imitators.

-- Martin Luther

Making every effort

2011-04-23T08:50:00.001-04:00

Tullian Tchividjian responds to a blog comment regarding the ‘make every effort’ side of Christian living:

To be sure, nothing I say in this post or anywhere else would indicate that I “stand back from stressing the make-every-effort-side of Christian living.” As I say in my comment above, the “every effort”, the fight, the battle, is against unbelief. It’s our failure to believe the gospel that produces bad behavior. It’s the bad root which produces the bad fruit.

It’s comparably easy to spend our lives “making every effort” to address the fruit. It’s a war of worlds to spend our lives “making every effort” to address the root. Unbelief is the root. That’s the front line. That’s where we need to “make every effort.”

--Tullian Tchividjian, in a blog comment: here

This Easter is about my limp

2011-04-22T16:28:00.003-04:00

This Easter is about my limp.

This week's a reminder how my flesh is knocked out of joint and I'm living the crippled life, out of socket. How I must now lean on Him to walk straight. How my handicapped heart needs revealing so that I become desperate for His touch.

...

This week is about looking to that cross, the broken body who came to fill our empty soul-tombs. And when we finally grab hold with all desperation, don't be startled or embarrassed by this Holy cripple. There's deep joy in this crutch. Because your crippled life {in Him} just means "you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” Genesis 32:28

-- Tammy
Part of a larger post from her blog: "If Meadows Speak"

We don't offer people a system

2011-04-10T13:45:00.000-04:00

We cannot treat the Bible as a collection of therapeutic insights. To do so distorts its message and will not lead to lasting change. If a system could give us what we need, Jesus would never have come. But he came because what was wrong with us could not be fixed any other way. He is the only answer, so we must never offer a message that is less than the good news. We don't offer people a system; we point them to a Redeemer.

--Paul Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change (P&R, 2002), 9

Struggle = to rest in what He freely gives

2011-04-08T22:55:00.000-04:00

The fight is not the oppressive struggle to earn God’s final rest, but the satisfying struggle to rest in the peace that Jesus freely gives. . . .Don’t think of striving to get his favor. Think of striving with the favor of his help.

-John Piper, What Jesus Demands from the World, 184-5.

Which tree are you most aware of?

2011-04-02T09:11:00.000-04:00

We are all the same. We have plucked fruit from that forbidden tree. We have proudly declared that we know best, that we can take care of ourselves. We have crowned ourselves deities. 'Have you eaten from the tree?' Oh, yes and yes, over and over again in ways both glaring and hidden.

But the God-Man has been slain. The Lamb's blood has been spilt, and it covers us. Our rags have been replaced with his robes... 'Here, eat of this, it will give you life.'

...Have you eaten from that tree today? Have you satiated your soul with the luscious fruit that grows from this blood-soaked ground? Have you nourished your heart with his strength, his righteousness, his perfection, and the gospel? Have you shunned self-righteousness, self-reliance, self-improvement? Which tree are you most aware of?

Eat from the blessed tree, friend. Eat and eat and never stop. When you are hungry for something else, something more, something new, run to that tree. Stay there; rest in his shade. The door is open; the meal is ready. Sit down and eat.

--Elyse Fitzpatrick, Comforts from the Cross: Celebrating the Gospel One Day at a Time (Crossway, 2009), 137-38

Come close to grace

2011-03-27T07:46:00.000-04:00

God has assuredly promised his grace to the humble, that is, to those who lament and despair of themselves.

But no man can be thoroughly humbled until he knows that his salvation is utterly beyond his own powers, devices, endeavors, will, and works, and depends entirely on the choice, will, and work of another, namely, of God alone.

For as long as he is persuaded that he himself can do even the least thing toward his salvation, he retains some self-confidence and does not altogether despair of himself, and therefore he is not humbled before God, but presumes that there is--or at least hopes or desires that there may be--some place, time, and work for him, by which he may at length attain to salvation. But when a man has no doubt that everything depends on the will of God, then he completely despairs of himself and chooses nothing for himself, but waits for God to work; then he has come close to grace.

-- Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will, in LW, 33:61-62

A relationship never altered by me

2011-03-19T09:16:00.001-04:00

There is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. This is not true of us only when we believe. It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behavior may be. It is always on His “blood and righteousness” alone that we can rest.

--B. B. Warfield (1851 – 1921)

The Gospel: Live it? or Believe it?

2011-03-14T17:40:00.003-04:00

At the heart of the reformation's hermeneutics was the distinction between "Law" and "Gospel." ... The Law condemns and drives us to Christ, so that the Gospel can comfort without any threats or exhortations that might lead to doubt.

...

We often hear calls to "live the Gospel," and yet, nowhere in Scripture are we called to "live the Gospel." Instead, we are told to believe the Gospel and obey the Law, receiving God's favor from the one and God's guidance from the other. The Gospel--or Good News--is not that God will help us achieve his favor with his help, but that someone else lived the Law in our place and fulfilled all righteousness.

Others confuse the Law and Gospel by replacing the demands of the Law with the simple command to "surrender all" or "make Jesus Lord and Savior," as if this one little work secured eternal life.

Earlier this century, J. Gresham Machen declared, "According to modern liberalism, faith is essentially the same as 'making Christ master' of one's life...But that simply means that salvation is thought to be obtained by our obedience to the commands of Christ. Such teaching is just a sublimated form of legalism."(1)

In another work, Machen added, What good does it do to me to tell me that the type of religion presented in the Bible is a very fine type of religion and that the thing for me to do is just to start practicing that type of religion now?...I will tell you, my friend. It does me not one tiniest little bit of good...What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?(2)

Does that mean that the Word of God does not command our obedience or that such obedience is optional? Certainly not! But it does mean that obedience must not be confused with the Gospel. Our best obedience is corrupted, so how could that be good news? The Gospel is that Christ was crucified for our sins and was raised for our justification. The Gospel produces new life, new experiences, and a new obedience, but too often we confuse the fruit or effects with the Gospel itself. Nothing that happens within us is, properly speaking, "Gospel," but it is the Gospel's effect. Paul instructs us, "Only let your conduct be worthy of the gospel of Christ..." (Phil. 1:27).

...

But there are many, especially in our narcissistic age, whose ignorance of the Law leads them into a carnal security. Thus, people often conclude that they are "safe and secure from all alarm" because they walked an aisle, prayed a prayer, or signed a card, even though they have never had to give up their own fig leaves in order to be clothed with the righteousness of the Lamb of God.

...

Thus, Machen writes,A new and more powerful proclamation of law is perhaps the most pressing need of the hour; men would have little difficulty with the gospel if they had only learned the lesson of the law. As it is, they are turning aside from the Christian pathway; they are turning to the village of Morality, and to the house of Mr. Legality, who is reported to be very skillful in relieving men of their burdens... 'Making Christ Master' in the life, putting into practice 'the principles of Christ' by one's own efforts--these are merely new ways of earning salvation by one's obedience to God's commands. And they are undertaken because of a lax view of what those commands are. So it always is: a low view of law always brings legalism in religion; a high view of law makes a man a seeker after grace.(3)

--Michael S. Horton (with quotes from J. Gresham Machen)
source: here

NOTES:
(1) J. Gresham Machen, Christianity & Liberalism (Erdmans, 1923), p. 143.
(2) J. Gresham Machen, Christian Faith in the Modern World (Macmillan, 1936), p. 57.
(3) J. Gresham Machen, What is Faith? (Macmillan, 1925), pp. 137, 139, 152.

Hell, stressed in unwise ways

2011-03-07T06:46:00.000-05:00

Nevertheless, it is possible to stress the doctrine of hell in unwise ways. Many, for fear of doctrinal compromise, want to put all the emphasis on God's active judgment, and none on the self-chosen character of hell. Ironically, as we have seen, this unBiblical imbalance often makes it less of a deterrent to non-believers rather than more of one. And some can preach hell in such a way that people reform their lives only out of a self-interested fear of avoiding consequences, not out of love and loyalty to the one who embraced and experienced hell in our place. The distinction between those two motives is all-important. The first creates a moralist, the second a born-again believer.

--Tim Keller

Source: here

The outward virtues are only maidservants

2011-03-05T07:35:00.001-05:00

And if I gave him even all I could, it would be of no use to him; he would have no regard for it, even if I wore all the hoods of all the monks. He wants my whole heart; for the outward things, as the outward virtues, are only maid servants, he wants the wife herself. He demands, that I say from the bottom of my heart: I am thine. The union and the marriage are accomplished by faith, so that I rely fully and freely upon him, that he is mine. If I only have him, what can I desire more?

-- Martin Luther
Sermon: PARABLE OF THE KING WHO MADE A MARRIAGE FEAST FOR HIS SON

What if...

2011-03-04T17:23:00.004-05:00

"What if gratitude was as natural as breathing, because we knew in our bones that the air we breathe is grace?"

-- Ann Voskamp

Full, worthwhile post: Here

Only one thing blots out sins

2011-02-26T18:38:00.000-05:00

There is only one thing in the world that blots out sins. It is not our acts of contrition, not our repentance, not our alms or our good works. It is not even our prayers. It is the blood of Jesus Christ: ‘the blood of Jesus Christ … cleanses us from all sin’ (1 John 1:7).

— Adolphe Monod
Living in the Hope of Glory, ed. Constance K. Walker
(Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2002), 46

What I need first of all

2011-02-21T11:33:00.000-05:00

What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel; not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me.

--John Gresham Machen

Before any demand is made

2011-02-19T09:11:00.000-05:00

Christian existence is a strangely relaxed kind of strenuousness, precisely because the Christian gospel is what it is. Before ever any demand is made, the gift is offered: the announcement of good news precedes the challenge.

The indicative precedes the imperative as surely as the rope is made fast round a firm piece of rock for the climber’s security before he has to apply himself to the struggle. Moreover (if the parable may be extended one clause further), the climber must attach himself to the rope before starting his effort. So the gospel not only begins with the indicative statement of what God has done, before it goes on to the imperative: even the imperative is first a command to attach oneself, before it becomes a command to struggle.

The striving does come: strenuousness is indispensable for the Christian climber—but only in dependence on all that has first been given by God and then appropriated through the means of grace.

--C. F. D. Moule, “’The New Life’ in Colossians 3:1-17,” Review and Expositor 70:4 (1973), page 479 [ht]:

I cannot get it into my head

2011-02-12T08:26:00.003-05:00

Even though we are now in faith . . . the heart is always ready to boast of itself before God and say: 'After all, I have preached so long and lived so well and done so much, surely he will take this into account.' We even want to haggle with God to make him regard our life.

...

But it cannot be done. With men you may boast: (I have done the best I could toward everyone, and if anything is lacking I will still try to make recompense). But when you come before God, leave all that boasting at home and remember to appeal from justice to grace.

...

I myself have now been preaching and cultivating it through reading and writing for almost twenty years and still I feel the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God that I may contribute something, so that he will have to give me his grace in exchange for my holiness. Still I cannot get it into my head that I should surrender myself completely to sheer grace; yet this is what I should and must do.

--Martin Luther

Gospel mortification

2011-02-05T09:42:00.003-05:00

The difference between legal and gospel mortification:

They differ in their motives and ends. The believer will not serve sin, because he is alive to God, and dead to sin (Rom 6:6). The legalist forsakes sin, not because he is alive, but that he may live. The believer mortifies sin, because God loves him; but the legalist, that God may love him. The believer mortifies, because God is pacified towards him; the legalist mortifies, that he may pacify God by his mortification. He may go a great length, but it is still that he may have whereof to glory, making his own doing all the foundation of his hope and comfort.

--Ralph Erskine (1685-1752)

But when I found God so kind

2011-01-31T18:43:00.001-05:00

When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast to think that I could ever have rebelled against One who loved me so, and sought my good.

-- Charles H. Spurgeon

Christian Obedience

2011-01-30T14:20:00.001-05:00

So the issue is not whether obedience, the pursuit of holiness, and the practice of godliness is important. Of course it is. The issue is how do we keep God’s commands? What stimulates and sustains a long obedience in the same direction? Where does the power come from to do God’s will and to follow God’s lead?

...

When John talks about keeping God’s commands as a way to know whether you love Jesus or not, he’s not using the law as a way to motivate. He’s simply stating a fact. Those who love God will keep on keeping his commands. As every parent and teacher knows, behavioral compliance to rules without heart change will be shallow and short-lived. But shallow and short-lived is not what God wants (that’s not what it means to “keep God’s commands.”). God wants a sustained obedience from the heart. How is that possible? Long-term, sustained obedience can only come from the grace which flows from what Jesus has already done, not guilt or fear of what we must do.

...

As a pastor, one of my responsibilities is to disciple people into a deeper understanding of obedience—teaching them to say “no” to the things God hates and “yes” to the things God loves. But all too often I have wrongly concluded that the only way to keep licentious people in line is to give them more rules. The fact is, however, that the only way licentious people start to obey is when they get a taste of God’s radical, unconditional acceptance of sinners.

In Romans 6:1-4 the Apostle Paul answers lawlessness not with more law but with more gospel! In other words, licentious people aren’t those who believe the gospel of God’s free grace too much, but too little. ...The gospel swallows the tyranny as well as the guilt of sin. The irony, in other words, of gospel-based sanctification is that those who end up obeying more are those who increasingly realize that their standing with God is not based on their obedience, but Christ’s.

...

It sounds backward, but the path to holiness is through (not beyond) the grace of the gospel, because only undeserved grace can truly melt and transform the heart. The solution to restraint-free immorality is not morality. The solution to immorality is the free grace of God—grace so free that it will be (mis)heard by some as a license to sin with impunity. The route by which the New Testament exhorts radical obedience is not by tempering grace but by driving it home all the more deeply.

...

The Apostle Paul never uses the law as a way to motivate obedience; he always uses the gospel. ...Because God is not concerned with just any kind of obedience. What motivates our obedience determines whether or not it is a sacrifice of praise. The obedience that pleases God is obedience that flows from faith and grace; not fear and guilt.

Now, hear me: The law of God has its rightful place in the life of a Christian. It’s a gift from God. It’s good. It graciously shows Christians what God commands and instructs us in the way of holiness. But nowhere does the Bible say that the law possesses the power to enable us to do what it says.

...

The gospel serves the Christian by reminding us that God’s love for us does not get bigger when we obey or smaller when we disobey. And guess what? This makes me want to obey him more, not less!

...

Therefore, it’s the gospel (what Jesus has done) that alone can give God-honoring animation to our obedience. The power to obey comes from being moved and motivated by the completed work of Jesus for us. The fuel to do good flows from what’s already been done. So, while the law directs us, only the gospel can drive us.

--Tullian Tchividjian
snippets from a blog post: here

And the devil says, "Amen"

2011-01-29T10:15:00.001-05:00

The heart of man finds it difficult to believe that so great a treasure as the Holy Ghost is gotten by the mere hearing of faith. The hearer likes to reason like this: Forgiveness of sins, deliverance from death, the gift of the Holy Ghost, everlasting life are grand things. If you want to obtain these priceless benefits, you must engage in correspondingly great efforts. And the devil says, "Amen."

--Martin Luther
Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, chapter 3
(1535)

Rely solely

2011-01-28T18:49:00.000-05:00

That the Holy Scriptures cannot be penetrated by study and talent is most certain. Therefore your first duty is to begin to pray, and to pray to this effect... that if it please God to accomplish something for His glory—not for yours or any other person's—He very graciously grant you a true understanding of His words. For no master of the divine words exists except the Author of these words, as He says: 'They shall be all taught of God' (John 6:45). You must, therefore, completely despair of your own industry and ability and rely solely on the inspiration of the Spirit.

--Martin Luther, 1518
(What Luther Says: An Anthology, Vol. 1, p. 77)
Quoted by John Piper: here

He demands you give it to him

2011-01-22T13:58:00.001-05:00

Someone asked me, “Don’t you think Jesus wants us to have better marriages?” I thought for a minute and then said, “No. No, I don’t think he really cares one way or another whether we have better marriages or not. I don’t think he is concerned about us being better parents or getting promoted at work. No, I definitely think these are things that matter not in the least to him.”

You can probably understand why I’m not exactly at the top of the list for guest preachers any longer.

Let me just say this straight out. If all you are interested in is becoming is a better person, then Jesus is not your best avenue to get there. You can find lots of self-help books that deal with marriage, health, finances and life-issues you find yourself dealing with. They are piled high on tables leading into the temple. As a matter of fact, you can buy them in many temples every Sunday, credit cards accepted.

Jesus is not a self-help guru. He is not interested in you becoming a better person. He could not care less with you improving in any area of your life. Because in the end that is your life. Yours. And he demands you give it to him. All of it. An unconditional surrender. He did not come to improve you, or encourage you, or spur you on to bigger and better things. He came to raise the dead. And if you insist on living, then you’re on your own. Good luck. Sign up for all the seminars, workshops and marriage improvement weekends that you can, because you’re going to need them.

The Gospel is this: We are dead in our sins. Jesus, too, is dead in our sins. But because he is very God of very God, death could not hold him. He conquered sin and death and rose again. And the only life we are now offered is the life he lives in us. Period. He wants us dead. He’ll do the rest.

...

Jesus did not attract a huge following, simply because he refused to play the religious games of his day. As a matter of fact, he went out of his way to make the religious professionals hacked at him. And he also turned on those who followed him simply for what they could get. “You want to follow me? Hate your spouse, your kids, your extended family. Hate them.” “Oh, you like the food I provided for you? Want some more? Eat my flesh and drink my blood.” Not exactly the kind of thing to say in order to build your ministry now, is it?

-- Jeff Dunn
source: blog post - here

If you knew

2011-01-20T19:17:00.001-05:00

If you knew that there was one greater than yourself, who knows you better than you can know yourself and loves you better than you can love yourself, who can make you all you ought to be, steadier than your squally nature, able to save you from squandering your glorious life, who searches you beyond the standards of earth . . . one who gathered into himself all great and good things and causes, blending in his beauty all the enduring color of life, who could turn your dreams into visions and make real the things you hoped were true, and if that one had ever done one unmistakable thing to prove, even at the price of blood — his own blood — that you could come to him, and having failed, come again, would you not fall at his feet with the treasure of your years, your powers, service and love? And is there not one such, and does he not call you?

-- A. E. Whitham

Jesus is not a plan B

2010-12-30T08:20:00.001-05:00

Grace gives you your dignity back. Your dignity is rooted in the identity of Jesus. Jesus came FIRST. He’s not a plan B. He’s not an afterthought. He’s not a result of God saying, ‘Fine. I’ll do this.’

. . .

When we sin, we have all of hell trying to get us to believe that we have ruined everything. However, sin illuminates the need for Jesus. Hell wants you to believe that you’re only good enough if you’re good enough. God is trying to get you to see that He created you to need Him, therefore, without grace you are never going to be good enough. It’s not about your failure, it’s about the way this whole thing is set up. We’re useless without Him. Would you want it any other way?

-- S. Woods

Never look at yourself again

2010-12-29T11:16:00.000-05:00

Like Abraham, you must never look at yourself again, and at all that is so true of you. You are justified in spite of all that; it is what God has done in Christ. Look to that, rest on that, be confident in that. Hold up your head with boldness; yea, I say it with reverence, go even into the presence of God with ‘holy boldness’ and in ‘the full assurance of faith’; not boldness in yourself, but in your Mediator, in your great High Priest, in the One whom God raised from the dead in order to let you know that your sins were dealt with at the Cross once and for ever, and that He looks upon you as His dear child.

-Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans, p. 250

Faith is not our Rock

2010-12-10T12:38:00.001-05:00

Too many Christians live in constant despondency because they cannot distinguish between the rock on which they stand and the faith by which they stand upon the rock. Faith is not our rock; Christ is our rock. We do not get faith by having faith in our faith or by looking to faith, but by looking to Christ. Looking to Christ is faith.

Nor is it perfect faith, great faith, fruitful faith, strong faith that justifies. If we start qualifying our faith, we destroy the gospel. Our faith may be weak, immature, timid, even indiscernible at times, but if it is real faith it is justifying faith (Matthew 6:30). Our degree of faith affects sanctification and assurance, but not justification. Faith's value in justification does not lie in any degree in itself but in its uniting us to Christ and His glorious achievement. As George Downame illustrates:

"A small and weak hand, if it be able to reach up the meat to the mouth, as well performs its duty for the nourishment of the body as one of greater strength, because it is not the strength of the hand but the goodness of the meat which nourishes the body."

Far too often we are prone to look to the quality of our faith, the quality of our conviction of sin, the quality of our evangelical repentance, the quality of our love for the brethren for confirmation of our justification, forgetting that it is Christ alone who saves by gracious faith alone.

-- Dr. Joel Beeke

From this fountain, and from no other

2010-11-20T09:24:00.000-05:00

We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is of him. If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. For by his birth he was made like us in all respects, that he might learn to feel our pain. If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given to him to judge. In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.

--John Calvin, Institutes, 2.16.19.

It's not about getting it right

2010-11-13T17:21:00.002-05:00

The spiritual journey is not about living as we should so life works as we want. It’s not a linear path.

It’s not about growing up into the maturity of a good self-image and developing the energy to do good things; it is about growing down into the brokenness of self-despair and deepening our awareness of how poorly we love compared to Trinitarian standards. It’s not about working hard to get it right so we can present ourselves before God to receive the blessings we desire; it is about coming before Him as we are, honestly, pretending about nothing, becoming increasingly convinced that we can’t get it right though we try as hard as we can, then listening for the whisper of the Spirit, “Welcome! You’re home. You’re loved. You’ll be empowered to speak with your unique voice as you hear the Voice of God singing over you with great love.

The Spirit is inviting each one of us to walk a very different path, to embark on a radically different journey. We’re bidden to come as we are, boldly, without fear, even though our souls still sometimes seem a cesspool of foul muck with no living waters in sight, abandoning ourselves to God for whatever He chooses to allow, waiting for Him to reveal how near we are to Him already in every circumstance of life, and to then draw us nearer. That’s the new way of the Spirit.

--Larry Crabb, "The Pressure’s Off: There’s a New Way to Live"

He knows what we want

2010-11-11T21:50:00.003-05:00

I think one may be quite rid of the old haunting suspicion — which raises its head in every temptation — that there is something else than God, some other country into which he forbids us to trespass, some kind of delight which he ‘doesn’t appreciate’ or just chooses to forbid, but which would be real delight if only we were allowed to get it.

The thing just isn’t there. Whatever we desire is either what God is trying to give us as quickly as he can, or else a false picture of what he is trying to give us, a false picture which would not attract us for a moment if we saw the real thing. . . . He knows what we want, even in our vilest acts. He is longing to give it to us. . . . The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. . . . You know what the biologists mean by a parasite — an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.

--C. S. Lewis, in Walter Hooper, editor, They Stand Together (New York, 1979), page 465.

The human experience

2010-10-31T22:25:00.000-04:00

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience."

- Teilhard de Chardin, 1881 - 1955. A French Jesuit and philosopher.

Strong enough to exult in monotony

2010-10-30T21:23:00.000-04:00

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun: and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.

It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

—G.K. Chesteron, ”The Ethics of Elfland,” chapter 4 in Orthodoxy.

The Bible’s really not about you

2010-10-25T12:10:00.002-04:00

Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us.

Jesus is the true and better Abel who, though innocently slain, has blood now that cries out, not for our condemnation, but for our acquittal.

Jesus is the true and better Abraham who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void not knowing wither he went to create a new people of God.

Jesus is the true and better Isaac who was not just offered up by his father on the mount but was truly sacrificed for us. And when God said to Abraham, “Now I know you love me because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love from me,” now we can look at God taking his son up the mountain and sacrificing him and say, “Now we know that you love us because you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love from us.”

Jesus is the true and better Jacob who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserved, so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us.

Jesus is the true and better Joseph who, at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them.

Jesus is the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant.

Jesus is the true and better Rock of Moses who, struck with the rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert.

Jesus is the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends.

Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves.

Jesus is the true and better Esther who didn’t just risk leaving an earthly palace but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life, but gave his life to save his people.

Jesus is the true and better Jonah who was cast out into the storm so that we could be brought in.

Jesus is the real Rock of Moses, the real Passover Lamb, innocent, perfect, helpless, slain so the angel of death will pass over us. He’s the true temple, the true prophet, the true priest, the true king, the true sacrifice, the true lamb, the true light, the true bread.

The Bible’s really not about you – it’s about him.

-- Tim Keller (perhaps quoting an unknown source)
source: here

Are you in God's story or is God in yours?

2010-10-22T12:17:00.000-04:00

We are uprooted from our own existence and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath and grace. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the story of Christ on earth. God is with us today only as long as we are there. Our salvation is ‘from outside ourselves’ (extra nos). I find salvation, not in my life story, but only in the story of Jesus Christ. … What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality; our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are there in the Scriptures.

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We have forgotten who we are

2010-10-18T22:43:00.000-04:00

We drove the five hours back to my home, with mom beside me and a few of her possessions in the back. She dozed- which is most of what she does these days- and on the radio, someone had won the Powerball jackpot of $340 million.

I realized that, at this moment, $340 million would do nothing for my mom that I was not doing. I was loving her the best way I could by taking her to my family. The hugs of her grandkids, the meals we can fix, the care in the declining days to come- these are the gifts I want to give her. In reality, $340 million does nothing for this particular human being at this point in the journey.

Of course, this is always true. It is true for all of us, now, as much as it will be true when we are within sight of the end of life. But yet we live as if $340 million, or another hour at work, or a bigger house, or bigger church facility will give us what we need.

The truth is, we have forgotten who we are. We do not want to look at where we are going, and we do not want to accept that what we need most of all is there for us all the time in the grace of Christ.

I close with a prayer from someone in a similar class.

“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new. Too late have I loved you! You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you! In my weakness I ran after the beauty of the things you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The things you have made kept me from you – the things which would have no being unless they existed in you! You have called, you have cried, and you have pierced my deafness. You have radiated forth, you have shined out brightly, and you have dispelled my blindness. You have sent forth your fragrance, and I have breathed it in, and I long for you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst for you. You have touched me, and I ardently desire your peace.” --St. Augustine, Confessions

-- from an archived blog entry by Michael Spencer
source: here

The great danger facing all of us

2010-09-30T22:28:00.004-04:00

The great danger facing all of us… is not that we shall make an absolute failure of life, nor that we shall fall into outright viciousness, nor that we shall be terribly unhappy, nor that we shall feel [that] life has no meaning at all—not these things. The danger is that we may fail to perceive life’s greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to tender the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God—and be content to have it so—that is the danger: that some day we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with husks and trappings of life and have really missed life itself. For life without God, to one who has known the richness and joy of life with Him, is unthinkable, impossible. That is what one prays one’s friends may be spared—satisfaction with a life that falls short of the best, that has in it no tingle or thrill that comes from a friendship with the Father.

--Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), Sermons [1878]

He will not rule people with laws

2010-09-24T21:02:00.000-04:00

“There are laws enough in the world, more than people can keep. The state, fathers and mothers, schoolmasters, and law enforcement persons all exist to rule according to laws. But the Lord Christ says, 'I have not come to judge, to bite, to grumble, and to condemn people. The world is too much condemned. Therefore I will not rule people with laws. I have come that through my ministry and my death I may give help to all who are lost and may release and set free those who are overburdened with laws, with judgments, and with condemnation.'"

-Martin Luther
(Taken from his sermon on John 3, WA 47:27)

Leaving virtue, embracing grace

2010-09-18T11:52:00.000-04:00

"Christianity is not the move from vice to virtue, but rather the move from virtue to grace."

-Gerhard Forde

Emmanuel ... "God With Us"

2010-09-15T21:21:00.005-04:00

I realized that rather than focusing my ministry on trying to get more people to change more of their circumstances to do more for God, what I really want to do, and what I think my core calling should be in ministry, is helping people get a vision of life with God.

- Skye Jethani

Including Christ vs According to Christ

2010-09-07T20:49:00.005-04:00

"See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elementary spirits of the world, and not according to Christ". (Colossians 2:8)

What is Christian? What makes anything Christian? Not that it has to do with theology, not that it has to do with ministry, not that it has to do with church business, and so forth. What makes anything Christian is that it reflects Christ. It is “according to Christ.”

“We reach the sacred watchword here, and pause to listen to it. ‘Not according to Christ,’ not on His line, not measured by Him, not referred to Him, not so that He is Origin and Way and End and All. The ‘philosophy’ in question would assuredly include Him somehow in its terms. But it would not be ‘according to Him.’ It would take its first principles and draw its inferences, a priori and from other regions, and then bring Him in as something to be harmonized and assimilated, as far as might be. But this would mean a Christ according to the system of thought, not a system of thought according to the blessed Christ. . . . It must have Him for Alpha and for Omega, and for all the alphabet between. It must be dominated all over by Him.”

H. C. G. Moule, Colossians and Philemon Studies, pages 142-143.

--Ray Ortlund, also quoting H.C.G. Moule
Source: here

You can't fix this, so I have to fix it for you

2010-09-04T20:43:00.006-04:00

More than just duty or doctrine:

The simplest thing ... to look at a passage and not simply say, "What duty or doctrine is here." If you didn't approach [the gospel] with just those glasses on, but put on another set of lenses. And you said, "What is the human dilemma here." What is the aspect of our falleness that the Holy Spirit is addressing in this place. And how is God showing us that He fixes the problem. He's not just saying to people, "You be better and I'll love you." Or, "You can fix this because you're able." He's actually over and over again saying in His word, "you can't fix this, so I have to fix it for you." So if we look at the text and we just begin by saying, "What's the human dilemma, what's the burden, what's the fallen condition that requires a divine solution?" And just those two questions, "What's the fallen condition? What's the divine solution?", will begin to have us see a biblical text for more than just behaviors or knowledge. We'll actually begin seeing redemptive truth that's there, that's teaching us what our situation is, but more, how God is redemptively providing our way out of that situation.

-- Bryan Chapell

Love the Lord your God

2010-08-26T20:05:00.003-04:00

Oswald Chambers asks, "Are you more devoted to your idea of what Jesus wants than to Himself?"

"Yes, Lord, I am."

How often I pick the path of performing for him over loving him.

I'm embarrassed to tell you that I take refuge almost every day in my idea of what Jesus wants. I'll venture to say that most of us have our own ideas of that, and we feel satisfied or even prideful when we manage to put checkmarks in our spiritual 'to do' list or paste in gold stars when we successfully avoid what's prohibited.

Give me a Bible to read. Give me your prayer requests. Give me a 40-day fast every year. Give me the chance to turn over my money. Give me some act of service to do. Give me lots of opportunities to be nice, nice, nice. Just don't make me do something that others might not like. Don't make me face any danger. Don't cloud any black and white issues with something gray. Above all, don't make me put down what I hold dear - my people, my reputation, or my work.

...

The rich young ruler walked away sad. As it turned out, his devotion was to his idea of what Jesus wanted. Jesus surprised him by demanding something he did not anticipate - a love that would make him lay down everything he held dear and follow a wandering rabbi to unknown places living a life he couldn't reconcile with what he'd always believed.

...

David, on the other hand, lived. Looking at David's life, there is a pretty fair balance between action and adoration, but if one outweighed the other, David's love of God trumped his behavior, even in an age of Law. God reminded Samuel as he was about to anoint David as future king, "The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." (I Samuel 16:7)

According to Acts 13:22, "'I have found David son of Jesse a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.'" This verse seems to link David's distinction as a man after God's heart, with action - doing what God wanted him to do.

...

This is really the crux of the matter for us. Do we merely believe in him and serve him carefully, or do we love him and follow him, even if it means living with the contempt of others - even if it makes life untidy, even if it departs from what we always thought Jesus wanted?

...

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment."

It seems to me that when we love God, we please him most. The ruler came minus sins, but also minus love and was sent away sad. David came dancing and loving and yes, sinning. Expressing the most fervent contrition, David deplored his own sin, but he neither walked self-consciously through life nor stopped running toward God with a passion. It was David's passion that pleased God and moved him in love to call this flawed king a man after his own heart.

And that is my desire as well.

--Lisa Dye
excerpts from a blog post: here

The grammar of the gospel

2010-08-24T20:28:00.004-04:00

There is a grammar by which Paul speaks the gospel. We need to learn to speak the gospel properly, but natively the gospel is a foreign language to us.

Those of you who studied Latin in high school remember that one of the first strange things that you have to learn is that you put the verb at the end. The doing word comes at the end. This is very difficult for us as Americans to understand how anybody could speak a language in which you put the doing word at the end, because we are a doing community.

But you see the gospel teaches us, doesn't it, to put our doing word at the end, and Jesus' doing word at the beginning. But our native tendency is to drag back the doing word and put it at the beginning, and then top that up with Jesus' doing, just to make life a little better.

But there's a very clear grammar in the gospel. We know that sometimes Paul seems to almost create words in order to express the gospel. He uses the greek language occasionally in a way that seems to have no parallel in classical greek because the gospel demands that we speak the gospel with a grammar that's characteristic of the gospel.

And in that sense we need to learn several principles. The first is, we need to learn that the grammar of the gospel has its appropriate mood. In our language we speak of the indicative mood and the imperative mood. The indicative mood is saying, "these are the things that are true". The imperative mood is saying, "these are the things you need to do". And in the gospel, the structure of the grammar is always: indicative gives rise to imperative.

That's why as gospel ministers we need to soak ourselves in such things as what the cross achieved. To be soaked in all that Christ has done, so that it oozes from us. So that preaching Christ is not something that we learn as a technique because we understand that it's the right thing to do, but we speak the grammar of the gospel because by God's grace through the word by the Spirit, that grammar has become instinctive to us. And it oozes from us. It's a very difficult thing to pin down isn't it?

There is an atmosphere that we give out in our preaching, isn't there? God has made it that way. And what oozes out of a preaching that in its depths has reversed the grammar of the gospel ... (No matter how much we speak formal gospel language) ... what is conveyed in the manner in which we say it is, "Pull yourself up by your bootstrings and do better." And we crush rather than convert.

--Sinclair Ferguson, from a sermon: "Paul on Union With Christ"
found: here

Stopping long enough to really want Him

2010-08-20T19:45:00.002-04:00

We pray “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want…” Meanwhile, our hearts are packed with the trickling of wanting. How to make it stop?

It sounds so good. Getting rid of clutter, the excess. Stuff. But, will having less make us want less?

Spurned by a poor economy, people are riding the growing wave of goal-oriented minimalists. It’s a head turning cultural phenomenon, shedding as much as possible. People are re-evaluating what makes them happy. They are asking, "What is tying me down and how can I be free from it?" The trend to live simply is a growing expression of relieving that frustration.

But if these people are willing to radically change to a simpler life because of ... happiness, what radical changes am I willing to simplify… to pursue God?

It became plain and simple to me. I can get so caught up trying to capture life, I miss the moments to simply live life with Jesus. If we are to live godly lives, we must remember Jesus. Jesus is the One we want to possess. He is the only reason why we would let go of anything. If we were to stop long enough to really want Him, He would be the prize we’d dump everything for. Just to savor His touch and His words.

Decluttering possessions to pursue happiness is a far cry from godliness.

Decluttering our priorities, so that God can possess us: Irrevocably… Life… Changing.

--------------------
Paraphrased snippets from a blog post: here, by Bonnie Gray

Believing what we believe we believe

2010-08-14T09:34:00.005-04:00

Do I just "believe that I believe"? Or do I really "believe"?

On April 25, 1951, the gospel came home to C. S. Lewis. This fascinating event does not seem to be well known, even among admirers. Yet Lewis refers to it no less than five times in volume three of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, which covers the final years of his life, 1950 to 1963.

From a letter to St. Giovanni Calabria in December 1951:

During the past year a great joy has befallen me. Difficult though it is, I shall try to explain this in words. It is astonishing that sometimes we believe that we believe what, really, in our heart, we do not believe.

For a long time I believed that I believed in the forgiveness of sins. But suddenly (on St. Mark’s Day [April 25]) this truth appeared in my mind in so clear a light that I perceived that never before (and that after many confessions and absolutions) had I believed it with my whole heart.

So great is the difference between mere affirmation by the intellect and that faith, fixed in the very marrow and as it were palpable, which the Apostle wrote was substance. . . .(p. 151-152)

In 1956, Lewis remarked to Mary Van Deusen, concerning the gospel:

I had assented to the doctrine years earlier and would have said I believed it. Then, one blessed day, it suddenly became real to me and made what I had previously called “belief” look absolutely unreal. (p. 751)

--both quotes from the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol 3

Some remarks made by Dane Ortlund in a blog post concerning these quotes:

Lewis was 53 in 1951. He had 12 years left to live. He had been a Christian for many years—a fruitful Christian for many years. And grace came home to Lewis one day in 1951 in such freshness and power that his previous grasp of grace seemed “absolutely unreal.”

By 1951 Lewis had written The Pilgrim’s Regress, the Space Trilogy, Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and much more. Seasoned Christian leaders never outgrow the need for a fresh outpouring of visceral awareness—a renewed “sense of the heart,” as Jonathan Edwards called it—of gospel grace.

-- source: here

Dead to the Law

2010-08-09T22:53:00.007-04:00

"But if her husband dies she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress. Likewise, my brethren, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit." (Romans 7:3-6)

Real Strength

2010-08-07T12:12:00.001-04:00

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness and nothing is so gentle as real strength.”

--Ralph W. Sockman

He has anchored himself to us

2010-08-01T11:22:00.000-04:00

We ought never to set present communion with Christ, as so many are doing, in opposition to the gospel; we ought never to say that we are interested in what Christ does for us now, but are not so much interested in what He did long ago.

Do you know what soon happens when men talk that way? They soon lose all contact with the real Christ; their religion would really remain essentially the same if Jesus never lived.

That danger should be avoided by the Christian man with all his might and main. God has given us an anchor for our souls; He has anchored himself to us by the message of the Cross. Let us never cast that anchor off; let us never weaken our connection with the events upon which our faith is based.

Such dependence upon the past will never prevent us from having present communion with Christ. Unlike the communion of the mystics it will be communion not with the imaginings of our own hearts, but with the real Saviour Jesus Christ.

The gospel of redemption through the Cross and resurrection of Christ is not a barrier between us and Christ, but it is the blessed tie by which He has bound us for ever to Him.

--J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 153-54

Falling in love

2010-07-29T22:32:00.000-04:00

Jesus replied: " ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. "

- Matthew 22:37-38

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.

What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything.

It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings, what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

-Pedro Arrupe

Sanctification: The end of self sufficiency

2010-07-24T20:26:00.006-04:00

"Personal holiness"—what thoughts does this phrase engender?

If I had to guess, I would say your mind went to thinking about spiritual disciplines or moral performance. Or at least that's what mine did. The word "personal" has a way of making our brains forget God's self-attested holiness and focus only on our own, which we typically equate to nothing more than our conceived progress in fulfilling certain do's and don'ts.

Moral code can easily become our attempt to live up to God's holiness. Ontology gives way to function. Being is replaced by doing (and not doing). Welcome to planet frustration. This is the world of many followers of Christ—the disappointing drudgery of the religious treadmill.

But there is good news. The gospel doesn’t stop where sanctification begins. Our holiness is not isolated from God’s holiness—it is dependent upon it.

John Webster explains in his book Holiness that sanctification is not an "acquired sufficiency" and that a Christian's holiness must always be in reference to the "triune work of grace." He writes,

The Christian’s sanctity is in Christ, in the Spirit, not in in itself; it is always and only an alien sanctity. Sanctification does not signal birth of self-sufficiency, rather it indicates a 'perpetual and inherent lack of self-sufficiency'.

Sanctification 'in' the Spirit is not the Spirit's immanence in the saint. Quite the opposite: it is a matter of the externality of Christian holiness, the saint being and acting in another.

'Sanctification in the Spirit' means: it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And 'Christ lives in me' means: by the Spirit's power I am separated from my self-caused self destruction, and given a new holy self, enclosed by, and wholly referred to, the new Adam in whom I am and in whom I act.

-Jonathan Parnell, sharing some thoughts about "personal holiness" at the Desiring God website, and quoting John Webster

source: here

It's all about what we have

2010-07-20T22:41:00.000-04:00

Tullian Tchividjian on Colossians 1:9-14 :

It’s important to note that in these verses Paul doesn’t pray for something the Colossian Christians don’t have. Rather, he prays they will grow in their awareness and understanding of what they do have. Christian growth doesn’t happen by working hard to get something you don’t have. Christian growth happens by working hard to live in the reality of what you do have.

I used to think that when the Bible tells us to work out our salvation, it meant go out and get what you don’t have-get more patience, get more strength, get more joy, get more love, and so on. But after reading the Bible more carefully I now understand that real gospel fruit happens, not as we “work harder” but only as we continually rediscover the gospel. You could put it this way: rediscovering the gospel is the hard work we’re called to.

You see, the secret of the gospel is that we become more spiritually mature when we focus less on what we need to do for God and focus more on all that God has already done for us. The irony of the gospel is that we actually perform better as we grow in our understanding that our relationship with God is based on Christ’s performance for us, not our performance for him.

-Tullian Tchividjian

Source: here

Rest in the covenant

2010-07-17T14:37:00.002-04:00

God will conquer your sin; God will sanctify you; God will save you; God will keep you; God will bring you to Himself. Rest in the covenant. Then, moved by intense gratitude, go forward to serve your Lord with all your heart and soul and strength. Being saved, live to praise Him. Do not work so that you may be saved, but serve him because you are saved, for the covenant has secured your safety.

-C.H. Spurgeon

Theology of Glory vs. Theology of the Cross

2010-07-16T12:13:00.000-04:00

1. Theologians of Glory
2. Theologians of the Cross

Gerhard O. Forde gives his definitions of these two terms found in his work: "On Being a Theologian of the Cross" (an in depth look at Martin Luther's Heidelberg Disputation):

Theologians of Glory – “operate on the assumption that what we need is optimistic encouragement, some flattery, some positive thinking, some support to build our self-esteem. Theologically speaking it operates on the assumption that we are not seriously addicted to sin, and that our improvement is both necessary and possible. We need a little boost in our desire to do good works. Of course the theologian of glory may well grant that we need the help of grace. The only dispute, usually will be about the degree of grace needed. If we are “liberal,” we will opt for less grace and tend to define it as some kind of moral persuasion or spiritual encouragement. If we are more “conservative” and speak even of the depth of human sin, we will tend to escalate the degree of grace needed to the utmost. But the hallmark of a theology of glory is that it will always consider grace as something of a supplement to whatever is left of human will and power. It will always, in the end, hold out for some free will.” (Forde, p. 16) – in short a theologian of glory sees the cross as a means to an end rather than the end itself. He/ she is interested in progression to glory as opposed to death and resurrection.

Theologians of the Cross – “operate on the assumption that there must be – to use the language of treatment for addicts – a ‘bottoming out’ or an ‘intervention.’ That is to say, there is no cure for the addict on his own. In theological terms, we must come to confess that we are addicted to sin, addicted to self, whatever form that may take, pious or impious. SO theologians of the cross know that we can’t be helped by optimistic appeals to glory, strength, wisdom, positive thinking, and so forth because those things are themselves the problem. The truth must be spoken. To repeat Luther again, the thirst for glory or power or wisdom is never satisfied even by the acquisition of it. We always want more – precisely so that we can declare independence from God. The thirst is for the absolute independence of the self, and that is sin. Thus again Luther’s statement of the radical cure in his proof for thesis 22: “The remedy for curing desire does not lie in satisfying it, but in extinguishing it.” The cross does the extinguishing. The cross is the death of sin, and the sinner. The cross does the ‘bottoming out.’ The cross is the ‘intervention.’ The addict/sinner is not coddled by false optimism but is put to death so that new life can begin. The theologian of the cross ‘says what a thing is’ (thesis 21). The theologian of the cross preaches to convict of sin. The addict is not deceived by theological marshmallows but is told the truth so that he might at last learn to confess, to say, ‘I am an addict,’ ‘I am an alcoholic,’ and never to stop saying it. Theologically and more universally all must learn to say, ‘I am a sinner,’ and likewise never to stop saying it until Christ’s return makes it no longer true.” (Forde, p. 17) – in short a theologian of the cross sees the cross as the end where we die to our sin with Christ and are raised a new creation with Christ. The work is truly finished as Christ promised and there is no moving on from His cross.

--Gerhard O. Forde

The essence of holiness

2010-07-12T18:05:00.000-04:00

You will cleanse no sin from your life that you have not first recognized as being pardoned through the cross. This is because holiness starts in the heart. The essence of holiness is not new behavior, activity, or disciplines. Holiness is new affections, new desires, and new motives that then lead to new behavior. If you don’t see your sin as completely pardoned, then your affections, desires, and motives will be wrong. You will aim to prove yourself. Your focus will be the consequences of your sin rather than hating the sin and desiring God in its place.

-- Tim Chester, You Can Change (Wheaton, Ill.; Crossway, 2010), 28.

A poor sinner who dares ...

2010-07-11T22:53:00.000-04:00

To come to Christ as a saint is very easy work. To trust to a doctor to cure you when you believe you are getting better is very easy. But to trust to your physician when you feel as if the sentence of death were in your body, to bear up when the disease is rising in your skin and when the ulcer is gathering its venom, to believe even then in the efficacy of the medicine--that is faith.

And so, when sin gets the master of you, when you feel that the law condemns you--then, even then, especially then--as a sinner, to trust Christ is the most daring feat in all the world. The faith that shook down the walls of Jericho, the faith that raised the dead, the faith that stopped the mouths of lions, was not greater than that of a poor sinner who dares to trust the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ when he is in the jaws of all his sins.

--Charles Spurgeon, Faith (Whitaker House 1995), 20-21

When His deep feedback invades our hearts

2010-07-05T22:12:00.005-04:00

We live in a feedback culture. Move your eyes to the right or the left and you’ll spot someone looking for feedback. There’s nothing wrong with feedback. The problem is most people are living FOR feedback, rather than FROM feedback.

We live FOR feedback when we base our identity/happiness on the evaluation others give of us.

This is the plot line of every reality TV show. A group of contestants have a job to perform (sing well, dance well, woo a woman’s heart, etc.). At the end of each show the contestants stand before the judges panel, anxiously awaiting the evaluation, their identity hanging in the balance (will I get a rose, or will I be rejected and sent home?).

I fear that many of us live the Christian life this way. We live FOR feedback. The deep feedback of the gospel hasn’t invaded our hearts, so we spend each day following the plotline of reality TV, anxiously unsure of what the people we’ve placed on the judgment panel of our lives really think about us. We feel the same lack of assurance with God.

Jesus creates a paradigm shift in our relationship to feedback. Jesus shows us a new way: living FROM feedback, not FOR feedback.

On that day when Jesus got a hold of your life, he gave you a rose that will never wilt or be taken back. He gave you feedback that transformed your identity and remains true with each ongoing day of your Christian life. And what God wants from us, what gives him so much glory, is for us to be a people who live FROM his deep feedback, rather than FOR feedback.

As the good news evaluation of the Father seeps deeper into the caverns of our feedback craving hearts, the Spirit empowers us to live radically confident lives, lives that look very different from a feedback-starved world. If we could only begin each day remembering the feedback we’ve already received from the Father.

Today, live FROM feedback, not FOR feedback. Begin your day remembering that your name is already written in the book of life! You don’t have to go out and make a name for yourself today. When you’re tempted today to base your joy and identity on how others evaluate you/your performance, catch yourself, stop yourself–make a decision to live FROM feedback (the feedback of your Father), not FOR feedback.

-Justin David Buzzard
source: here

The gospel in four words

2010-06-18T12:05:00.001-04:00

‘Come unto me,’ he says, ‘and I will give you.’ You say, ‘Lord, I cannot give you anything.’ He does not want anything. Come to Jesus, and he says, ‘I will give you.’ Not what you give to God, but what he gives to you, will be your salvation. ‘I will give you’ — that is the gospel in four words.

- C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), I:175. Italics original.

Some Kind of Wonderful

2010-06-13T07:26:00.001-04:00

John Hughes was the muse of the 80s high schooler. His writing credits include such giants of the genre as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. In 1987, he finished his run of high school smash hits with Some Kind of Wonderful, the story of a guy (Eric Stoltz) who falls in love with a girl (Lea Thompson) who is completely out of his league. He recruits his best friend (Mary Stuart Masterson) to help him win Thompson's heart, never knowing the obvious truth: Masterson is desperately in love with him.

In true romanitc comedy form, Thompson proves not the vision of perfection she seemed to be from afar, and Stoltz realizes that the girl he really wanted, Masterson, was right there all along. This is not a unique trope, but it might be the clearest distillation of the Christian life, both misguided and proper, that we could ever hope to find.

Christians begin their life desperately seeking to know more about God. At first blush, there is nothing wrong with this goal.

But Luther himself said that the quest to know God was folly, and that the only reason we seek to know God was to domesticate and control him. It is Jesus who we draft into service as our guide to "become more like God" or to "get to know Him more."

Eric Stoltz thinks that he can turn himself into someone that Leah Thompson will love. This is the Christian quest to "know God." To know him, to become like him, so that he will love us more. We call this quest innocuous things like "deepening our relationship" and the goal seems laudable. But it doesn't work. Lea Thompson is inscrutable. Hard to understand. Counter-intuitive. Like God, she can't be "gotten to." It just doesn't work.

It is Mary Stuart Masterson, in the Christ role, who is there for us. Stoltz sees her as a means to an end...and yet, she is the end. She is the love of his life. We too often see Christ as a means to get us closer to God, but it is Christ who is there to pick us up when our quest for God ends as it must: in bitter defeat and failure.

John Hughes puts in our common language what Luther, and before him John the Evangelist (John 1:17-18), said in theological language: We cannot know God. To try is to waste our time, at best, and to struggle for independence from him, at worst. God, though, has made himself known, in God the Son, Jesus Christ. The one we try to use as a means to an end is, in fact, the end in himself. He is the Savior.

-- Nick Lannon
source: here

Let His Love Win Your Love

2010-06-12T08:55:00.000-04:00

When we go to the cross, we see our God dying for us. If you let any other god down, it will beat you up. If you live for people’s approval or your career or possessions or control or anything else and you don’t make it or you mess up, then you’ll be left feeling afraid, downcast, or bitter. But when you let Christ down, he still loves you. He doesn’t beat you up; he died for you.

Let his love win your love, and let that love replace all other affections. The secret of change is to renew your love for Christ as you see him crucified in your place.

- Tim Chester, You Can Change (Wheaton, Ill.; Crossway, 2010), 128.

How do you accept Jesus?

2010-06-04T22:07:00.002-04:00

You and I are not integrated, unified, whole persons. Our hearts are multi-divided. There is a board room in every heart. Big table. Leather chairs. Coffee. Bottled water. Whiteboard. A committee sits around the table. There is the social self, the private self, the work self, the sexual self, the recreational self, the religious self, and others. The committee is arguing and debating and voting. Constantly agitated and upset. Rarely can they come to a unanimous, wholehearted decision. We tell ourselves we’re this way because we’re so busy with so many responsibilities. The truth is, we’re just divided, unfocused, hesitant, unfree.

That kind of person can “accept Jesus” in either of two ways. One way is to invite him onto the committee. Give him a vote too. But then he becomes just one more complication. The other way to “accept Jesus” is to say to him, “My life isn’t working. Please come in and fire my committee, every last one of them. I hand myself over to you. Please run my whole life for me.” That is not complication; that is salvation.

- Ray Ortlund
source: here

Singular weakness

2010-05-28T17:32:00.000-04:00

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness.” Romans 8:26

Romans 8:26 does not say, “The Spirit helps us in our weaknesses” but singular “weakness.” Our problem is not just weaknesses. More profoundly, our problem is weakness. Weakness is not just one more experience alongside our other experiences; weakness is the platform on which we have all our experiences. Weakness is a pervasive presence in all we are and do. It will not always be so. But for now, it is.

Every Sunday I am a weak man preaching to weak people. Admonition has its place. But what weak people need, more than admonition, is help. For weak people to live the Christian life in a way that is humane and sustainable, rather than defeating and shaming, we need good news more than good challenge.

Weak sinners, continually reassured by grace, will accomplish more for Christ than they would if continually confronted by demand. I am thankful that the Spirit meets us not in our strength but in our weakness, where alone His help enters in.

-Ray Ortlund

source: here

Jesus + Nothing = Everything

2010-05-26T12:53:00.001-04:00

I used to think Christian growth happened as we go out and get what we don’t have–if we’re going to grow we have to go out and get more patience, get more strength, get more joy, etc. But after reading the Bible more carefully I’ve learned that Christian growth does not happen by working hard to get something you don’t have; Christian growth happens by working hard to live in the reality of what you do have.

-Tullian Tchividjian

source: here

Taking sin seriously

2010-05-13T22:38:00.002-04:00

The divine word does not impose constraints, make demands, and level requirements. Rather it simply frees. The Gospel forbids nothing, it merely liberates us for lives of true fullness.

Of course to many this will seem woefully inadequate. Is this not simply a cover for moral libertinism? Does not all this fanciful talk of “opened opportunities” merely mask a maneuver that seeks to use “freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence” (Gal 5:13)?

Actually, no not all. In fact this resurrection-centered understanding of the nature of the Gospel’s morality is the only way I can possibly imagine to take sin seriously. This notion insists that all sin is never a matter of some “thing” I can do that I ought not to do. Rather sin is always and everywhere a falling into slavery. The Gospel does not, therefore “forbid” us to sin — what real sense would it make to say that we are “forbidden” to enslave ourselves, mutilate ourselves, denigrate ourselves? — rather the Gospel frees us from sin.

The problem with the traditionally “serious” way of talking about sin and ethics is that it ends up simultaneously not taking sin seriously and making it far too interesting. If we view sin simply as bad, but nearly always seductive and at least fleetingly pleasurable things we ought not to do, we at once make sin interesting and rather un-serious. If however we take the logic of the Gospel seriously we must understand sin always and only as slavery, as domination, denigration, and futility. We are not “forbidden” to be enslaved, we are freed from our slavery. We are not “commanded” to no longer dominate and denigrate ourselves and one another, we are freed from that infantile and dreadful compulsion.

This, it seems to me is the only way to really take sin seriously and to recognize how uninteresting it is. Sin is simply the slaveries we subject ourselves and one anther to. It is a world of striving, suffering, and death. God doesn’t come to us with commands not to do such things, God in Christ breaks the power of these forces and frees us from them. The Gospel closes down no true opportunity for anything interesting, rather it always on only opens opportunities and creates new possibilities. It is always and only a liberation. Nothing more, nothing less. Anything else simply doesn’t take sin seriously.

--Halden Doerge
Source: here

My human love for God, in context

2010-05-02T11:51:00.003-04:00

One of the more profound statements ever made by a Christian theologian is the final thesis of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, written in 1518, barely six months after he had nailed his epoch-making Ninety-five Theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg. The Ninety-five Theses were a call to arms against church abuses. The final thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation summed up the “ideology” that generated the call. Luther formulated it as a contrast between two kinds of love, human and divine: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.”

Consider, first, what Luther calls human love, but which is better described as distorted love. It’s elicited by the object of love; it’s basically passive in the sense that it depends on the object of love. Its only activity, says Luther, consists in “receiving something.” A person sees beauty – or goodness or truth – and wants to have it. As a consequence, people who love in this way seek their “own good” in those they love; they don’t bestow any good on them. A man may shower a woman with gifts, but he may be doing it so that he can ingratiate himself to her, enjoy her, keep her, or even worse, so that he can display her as a trophy. When we love in this way, we are receivers, not givers.

Contrast this kind of possessive love with divine love. First, divine love never had to come into being at all; it wasn’t elicited by its object. It simply is. It doesn’t depend on the truth, beauty, or goodness of the beloved. Second, as Luther stated, because God’s love isn’t caused by its object, it can love those who are not lovable, “sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise and strong.” Luther concluded, “rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good.” Such divine love is supremely manifested on the cross on which Jesus Christ took the sin of the world upon himself. ”This is the love of the cross, born of the cross, which turns in the direction where it does not find good which it may enjoy, but where it may confer good upon the bad and needy person.” Unlike merely human love, divine love gives and doesn’t receive.

-Miroslav Volf, "Free of Charge" (p. 38-39)

As the tide lifts a grounded ship

2010-04-30T09:44:00.001-04:00

Poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.

-- C.S. Lewis
from "The Weight of Glory"

Christ dwells only in sinners

2010-04-29T18:32:00.002-04:00

Now I should like to know whether your soul, tired of its own righteousness, is learning to be revived by and to trust in the righteousness of Christ . . .

Beware of aspiring to such purity that you will not wish to be looked upon as a sinner, or to be one. For Christ dwells only in sinners. On this account he descended from heaven, where he dwelt among the righteous, to dwell among sinners. Meditate on this love of his and you will see his sweet consolation.

-Martin Luther, writing to George Spenlein, quoted in Theodore G. Tappert, editor, Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel (Philadelphia, 1955), page 110. Language updated.