The Gospel is for Christians
The following comes from Tullian Tchividjian’s blog:
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The great theologian B. B. Warfield on why the gospel is needed for believers:
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.
Total Grace and Mercy for Christ’s Sake
I’ve been encouraged to read Luther’s Commentary on Galatians by several people over the past couple years and came across the following in a bible study on Galatians from Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. The following excerpt is one of the best paragraphs ever written. If you are looking for a good bible study, click here and if you want to see more of Luther’s Commentary, click here.
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It is an absolute and unique teaching in all the world, to teach people, through Christ, to live as if there were no law or wrath or punishment. In a sense, they do not exist any longer for the Christian, but only total grace and mercy for Christ’s sake. Once you are in Christ, the law is the greatest guide for your life, but until you have Christian righteousness, all the law can do is to show you how sinful and condemned you are. In fact, to those outside of Christian righteousness, the law needs to be expounded in all its force. Why? So that people who think they have power to be righteous before God will be humbled by the law and understand they are sinners. Therefore we must be careful to use the law appropriately. If we used the law in order to be accepted by God through obedience, then Christian righteousness becomes mixed up with earned/moral righteousness in our minds. If we try to earn our righteousness by doing many good deeds, we actually do nothing. We neither please God through our works-righteousnessnor do we honor the purpose for which the law was given. But if we first receive Christian righteousness, then we can use the law, not for our salvation, but for his honor and glory, and to lovingly show our gratitude. So then, have we nothing to do to obtain this righteousness? No, nothing at all! For this righteousness comes by doing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing nothing, but rather in knowing and believing this only — that Christ has gone to the right hand of the Father, not to become our judge, but to becomefor us our wisdom, our righteousness, our holiness, our salvation! Now God sees no sin in us, for in this heavenly righteousness sin has no place. So now we may certainly think, “Although I still sin, I don’t despair, because Christ lives, who is both my righteousness and my eternal life.” In that righteousness I have no sin, no fear, no guilty conscience, no fear of death. I am indeed a sinner in this life of mine and in my own righteousness, but I have another life, another righteousness above this life, which is in Christ, the Son of God, who knows no sin or death, but is eternal righteousness and eternal life.
Stop Tinkering
Per Buzzard Blog:
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Stop tinkering with your soul and look away to the perfect One.
-A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
God Wants You to Give Up
Per Justin Taylor’s blog, Between Two Worlds @ The Gospel Coalition:
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Paul Tripp, What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage (pp. 51-52)
[God's] grace purposes to expose and free you from your bondage to you. His grace is meant to bring you to the end of yourself so that you willing finally begin to place your identity, your meaning and purpose, and your inner sense of well-being in him.
So he places you in a comprehensive relationship with another flawed person, and he places that relationship right in the middle of a very broken world.
To add to this, he designs circumstances for you that you would have never designed for yourself.
All this is meant to bring you to the end of yourself, because that is where true righteousness begins.
He wants you to give up.
He wants you to abandon your dream.
He wants you to face the futility of trying to manipulate the other person into your service.
He knows there is no life to be found in these things.
What does this practically mean?
It means the trouble that you face in your marriage is not an evidence of the failure of grace.
No, these troubles are grace.
They are tools God uses to pry us out of the stultifying confines of the kingdom of self so that we can be free to luxuriate in the big-sky glories of the kingdom of God.
This means that you and I will never understand our marriages and never be satisfied with them until we understand that marriage is not an end to itself.
No, the reality is that marriage has been designed by God to be a means to an end.
When you make it the end, bad things happen.
But when you begin to understand that it is a means to an end, then you begin to enjoy and see the value in things that you would not have been able to enjoy before.
Tripp doesn’t quote C.S. Lewis here, but Lewis often made a similar point about the difference between ultimate things and good things—between first things and secondary things—and knowing the difference. For example, in 1940 Lewis wrote:
[Sensual love] ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god.
So many things—nay every real thing—is good if only it will be humble and ordinate.
Or one of my favorite Lewis quotes:
When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.
Insofar as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all.
When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
—C. S. Lewis, Letters of C.S. Lewis (8 November, 1952)
According to His Own Mercy
Titus 3:4-7
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
All of Life is Repentance
The following comes from Tim Keller’s All of Life is Repentance. It’s 2 pages and very encouraging. Read all of it here.
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Like this:
His Compulsion is our Liberation
The following comes from Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis (p. 228):
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You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
