Already Sons
Here’s a quote from a friend, Brian Wildman. He left this as a comment on a previous post and it struck me. It pertains to the fact that we are sons of God in Christ now. It seems to me that the crucial factor here is belief. I could use a good dose of increased belief in what Christ has accomplished for me and who I am in Him.
I need to stop trying so hard to become something I already am — HIS.
Loved Forevermore
The following post comes from Tullian Tchividjian’s blog.
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Amongst other things, the gospel is the good news that if we, by faith, embrace all that Christ has done for sinners, then we can be assured that absolutely nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39). Once we know that we’re forever loved by Jesus, we’re free to love others regardless of the risk, because our deep need to love will be satisfied.
A friend once told me, “My home is an unloving place.” When he returned there everyday from work, he said he wasn’t loved the way he longed to be loved by his wife and kids. I listened to him, and we talked further. Eventually I responded, “Maybe, just maybe, you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective.” I suggested that for six months he ask himself the following question each day when he came home from work: “Who here can I love? Who here needs my love right now?” I told him to pray about this before he walked in the door, asking God to show him the answer to that question. This man did that, and things at home changed.
Unfortunately, the fear that our love toward others will not be reciprocated is something that paralyzes many of us. It prevents parents from properly loving their kids, and husbands and wives from properly loving each other. We come to this conclusion: I will love you only to the degree that you love me. It’s an attitude that enslaves us. But the gospel frees us from that.
I too enjoy receiving love from my family. I’m ecstatic when my kids love me and express affection toward me. Something in me comes alive when they do that. But I’ve learned this freeing truth: I don’t need that love, because in Jesus, I receive all the love I need. This in turn enables me to love my kids without fear or reservation. I get to revel in their enjoyment of my love without needing anything from them in return. I get love from Jesus so that I can give love to them.
The gospel tells us that God in Christ loved sinners even while we hated him. Fully realizing this will pave the way for us to love others unconditionally as well. We realize and experience this liberating truth: “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16). This kind of lay-down-your-life love is the clearest indicator of a gospel-centered life.
But laying down your life for others is impossible. It’s too scary—unless you know you’ve been eternally loved by Christ. Then you’re free to give your life to others, because you’ve received so much yourself.
Do you realize how radically different this world would be if that was the rule instead of the exception in all our relationships? The most powerful way we can join God on his mission to bring heaven to earth—to warm this place up, and renew and redeem and fix this broken planet—is by applying the gospel in this way, in all our relationships.
Are You Living by the Sweat of your own Performance?
The following comes from Tullian Tchividjian’s blog:
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I have been reading Jerry Bridges’ excellent book Transforming Grace. It’s an absolute must read if you haven’t already read it. And if you have, I encourage you to re-read it. As is the case with everything Jerry writes, it is delectably deep and down to earth. I read these sentences last night once again and they really reminded me of just how easily I can drift into a performance driven relationship with God. He writes:
My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace. If we’ve performed well–whatever “well” is on our opinion–then we expect God to bless us. If we haven’t done so well, our expectations are reduced accordingly. In this sense, we live by works rather than by grace. We are saved by grace, but we are living by the “sweat” of our own performance.
Moreover, we are always challenging ourselves and one another to “try harder.” We seem to believe success in the Christian life (however we define success) is basically up to us: our commitment, our discipline, and our zeal, with some help from God along the way. We give lip service to the attitude of the Apostle Paul, “But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10), but our unspoken motto is, “God helps those who help themselves.”
The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of my own performance is a very freeing and joyous experience.
Amen.
As I said in my sermon last week, the difference between living for God and living for anything else is that when we live for anything else we do so to gain acceptance. When we live for God we do so because we are already accepted. Real freedom (the freedom that only the Gospel grants) is living for something because we already have favor instead of living for something in order to gain favor.
The Freer it is, the Better it is (T. Chalmers)
The following excerpt comes from “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” by Thomas Chalmers, a famous Scottish preacher from the early 19th centruy. I encourage you to read this sermon in its entirety (only 11 pages). You can find it here.
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Thus it is, that the freer the Gospel, the more sanctifying is the Gospel; and the more it is received as a doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according to godliness. This is one of the secrets of the Christian life, that the more a man holds of God as a pensioner, the greater is the payment of service that he renders back again. On the tenure of “Do this and live,” a spirit of fearfulness is sure to enter; and the jealousies of a legal bargain chase away all confidence from the intercourse between God and man; and the creature striving to be square and even with his Creator, is, in fact, pursuing all the while his own selfishness, instead of God’s glory; and with all the conformity’s which he labours to accomplish, the soul of obedience is not there, the mind is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed under such an economy ever can be. It is only when, as in the Gospel, acceptance is bestowed as a present, without money and without price, that the security which man feels in God is placed beyond the reach of disturbance – or, that he can repose in Him, as one friend reposes in another, – or, that any liberal and generous understanding can be established betwixt them – the one party rejoicing over the other to do him good – the other finding that the truest gladness of his heart lies in the impulse of a gratitude, by which it is awakened to the charms of a new moral existence.
Salvation by grace – salvation by free grace – salvation not of works, but according to the mercy of God – salvation on such a footing is not more indispensable to the deliverance of our persons from the hand of justice, than it is to the deliverance of our hearts from the chill and the weight of ungodliness. Retain a single shred or fragment of legality with the Gospel, and we raise a topic of distrust between man and God. We take away from the power of the Gospel to melt and to conciliate. For this purpose, the freer it is, the better it is. That very peculiarity which so many dread as the germ of antinomianism, is, in fact, the germ of a new spirit, and a new inclination against it. Along with the light of a free Gospel, does there enter the love of the Gospel, which, in proportion as we impair the freeness, we are sure to chase away. And never does the sinner find within himself so mighty a moral transformation, as when under the belief that he is saved by grace, he feels constrained thereby to offer his heart a devoted within, and to deny ungodliness. To do any work in the best manner, we should make use of the fittest tools for it.
Carson: The Necessary Consequences of the Gospel Are Not the Gospel
From D.A. Carson’s editorial in the latest Themelios:
[O]ne must distinguish between, on the one hand, the gospel as what God has done and what is the message to be announced and, on the other, what is demanded by God or effected by the gospel in assorted human responses. If the gospel is the (good) news about what God has done in Christ Jesus, there is ample place for including under “the gospel” the ways in which the kingdom has dawned and is coming, for tying this kingdom to Jesus’ death and resurrection, for demonstrating that the purpose of what God has done is to reconcile sinners to himself and finally to bring under one head a renovated and transformed new heaven and new earth, for talking about God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, consequent upon Christ’s resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Majesty on high, and above all for focusing attention on what Paul (and others—though the language I’m using here reflects Paul) sees as the matter “of first importance”: Christ crucified. All of this is what God has done; it is what we proclaim; it is the news, the great news, the good news.
By contrast, the first two greatest commands—to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves—do not constitute the gospel, or any part of it. We may well argue that when the gospel is faithfully declared and rightly received, it will result in human beings more closely aligned to these two commands. But they are not the gospel. Similarly, the gospel is not receiving Christ or believing in him, or being converted, or joining a church; it is not the practice of discipleship. Once again, the gospel faithfully declared and rightly received will result in people receiving Christ, believing in Christ, being converted, and joining a local church; but such steps are not the gospel.
Lion Out of the Cage
Quote from Doug Wilson, found @ Blog and Mablog
… But grace itself, the real thing, is a lion out of the cage.
There will be wretched people in Heaven who sinned far more grievously than other socially decent people who are in Hell. There will be people who worked for the last hour of the day and are paid the same as those who worked all day. There will be hookers and coke addicts in Heaven, and members of the Evangelical Theological Society who aren’t. There will be people up there like Rahab who was justified by lying, saying that the spies went one direction when she knew damn well they went another. And God said, “Well done, woman. I’ll have the apostle James use you for an example of how faith without works is dead.” So there’s a doctrine for you. Justification by lying. And there will be people in heaven even though they occasionally use words like damn to make a point. As though I was not in enough trouble. In the realm of God’s work, there are kings praised for eating the shewbread that they were not supposed to eat, and kings struck with leprosy for going into the temple where they were not supposed to go. There will be priests praised for profaning the sabbath by offering sacrifices on that day, even though they were guiltless in their sinning. There will be rabbis praised for breaking the sabbath through perfoming circumcisions on that day, and Presbyterian ministers praised for violating the Lord’s Day by administering baptisms then. There will be thousands of “pagans” from the Old Testament saved, people who were under no obligation whatever to become Jews. Who will be saved outside the covenant nation of Israel? Well, Melchizedek, Jethro, Namaan the Syrian, Job the Edomite, the inhabitants of Ninevah who repented at the preaching of Jonah, and however many antediluvians who had a change of heart after the door closed and the rain started. Make no mistake — saving a planet full of sinners like us is a messy task, and not one for the tidy-minded.
But we still get worried with the notion that the Spirit is a mighty, rushing wind who is rampaging all over the place, saving people. We want grace in a can. We want to put grace into little spritzer bottles, and then we can mist each other at approved meetings. But the grace of God is a tornado, not a zephyr.
Aroma
2 Corinthians 2:14-17
14But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. 15For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, 16 to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? 17For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.
For the last few years now, this has been one of my favorite passages in scripture. I just love it, and I find myself drawn to it over and over. It is one of those passages that just continues to teach me new things over and over. I know that one reason I am drawn to it is because for me the sense of smell is very moving. More than any other sense, the sense of smell gives you a feeling and brings you to a place. The idea that I am the “aroma” of Christ is too good to be true. And, not that I am just the aroma of Christ among the saved or among the perishing, but that I am the aroma of Christ to God. That is mercy. I believe that small part of verse 15 is a beautiful picture of the gospel.
The God of the universe, the almighty, the holy of holies, the creator of all that is good and all that is beautiful, takes one whiff of my life and He smells Christ. How could this be? How could I, someone so selfish and impatient and short tempered and vain, be the aroma of Christ to God? Because, I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Galatians 2:20). It is just that simple. The beauty and mystery and wonder of the Christian life is that once we place our hope and trust in Christ we go from being the aroma of death to the aroma of life, the aroma of Christ.
The aroma of death is the aroma of our own doing. The aroma of death is the aroma of all our efforts to be good enough, to be accepted, to be our own savior, to be counted as worthy, to be a hero, to be right, to be heard, to be adored. As long as we spend our lives doing those things we are the aroma of death to God and to all those around us.
Once we cling to Christ and he becomes our only hope and he becomes our first love, then out of that will inevitably flow the aroma of life.
(written by Meghan Orr)
