Every call to worship is a call into the REAL WORLD.
I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I’m always in danger of losing my grip on reality.
- The REALITY, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior.
- The REALITY is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food.
- The REALITY is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.”
~ Eugene Peterson
Graffiti
The Spirituality I Want
“I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in a right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone. I want a relationship with the Abba of Jesus, who is infinitely compassionate with my brokenness and at the same time an awesome, incomprehensible, and unwieldly Mystery.”
~ Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin’s Path to God
Living in a State of Thankful Discontentment
The Christian life should be a state of thankful discontentment or joyful dissatisfaction! We live every day thankful for the amazing grace that fundamentally changes our lives, but we should not be satisfied.
Why not? Because, when we look at ourselves honestly, we have to admit that there is still need for personal growth and change. We are not yet all that we could be in Christ. We are thankful for the many things in our lives that would not be there without His grace, but we should not settle for partial inheritance. We should want nothing less than all that is ours in Christ!
In this sense, God does not want us to be content with less than what He wants for us. He calls us to continue to wrestle, meditate, look, consider, resist, submit, follow, and pray until we have been completely transformed into His likeness.
~ Paul David Tripp & Timothy S. Lane
The Gospel is Saying
“The gospel is saying that, what man cannot do in order to be accepted with God, this God Himself has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ. To be acceptable to God we must present to God a life of perfect and unceasing obedience to his will. The gospel declares that Jesus has done this for us. For God to be righteous he must deal with our sin. This also he has done for us in Jesus. The holy law of God was lived out perfectly for us by Christ, and its penalty was paid perfectly for us by Christ. The living and dying of Christ for us, and this alone is the basis of our acceptance with God”
~ Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel and Kingdom
The Hallmark of Authentic Evanglicalism
“The hallmark of authentic evangelicalism is not that we maintain the traditions of the evangelical elders. It is rather that we are prepared to re-examine even the most long-standing evangelical traditions in the light of Scripture, in order to allow Scripture, if necessary, to judge and reform our traditions. Evangelical traditions are not infallible; they need to be re-examined. They need to be judged. They need to be reformed.”
~ John R.W. Stott
Worship: The Center of Our Existence
“We worship God because God created us to worship him. Worship is at the center of our existence, at the heart of our reason for being. God created us to be his image – an image that would reflect his glory. In fact the whole creation was brought into existence to reflect divine glory. The psalmist tells us that: “the heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). … Worship must above all serve the glory of God.”
~ Hughes Oliphant Old
Greatest Barriers to Faith
“Perhaps one of the greatest barriers to faith is not the things we don’t know but the things we think we know yet we’re wrong about… We think of heaven as a pleasure factory rather than life with God… We think of Christians as people who have got the heaven job done, while we think of discipleship as optional extra-credit work for spiritual overachievers.”
The Ultimate Good of the Gospel
“The ultimate good of the gospel is seeing and savoring the beauty and value of God. God’s wrath and our sin obstruct that vision and that pleasure. You can’t see and savor God as supremely satisfying while you are full of rebellion against Him and He is full of wrath against you. The removal of this wrath and this rebellion is what the gospel is for. The ultimate aim of the gospel is the display of God’s glory and the removal of every obstacle to our seeing it and savoring it as our highest treasure. “Behold Your God!” is the most gracious command and the best gift of the gospel. If we do not see Him and savor Him as our greatest fortune, we have not obeyed or believed the gospel.“
~ From John Piper, God Is the Gospel: Meditations on God’s Love As the Gift of Himself:
Are We Singing the Same Song?
I cannot recall who said this, nor where I first read it, but the following statement resonates with me:
Jesus’ life and teaching always attracted a crowd; he was loved by the irreligious and was outcast and hated by the moralistic, legalistic, religious types. If our lives and proclamations of the gospel are not having a similar effect in our culture, then it is probably a different message we proclaim.
The 10 Commandments in American Culture
While reading through The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All the Answers, by David Hansen, (a book recently recommended to me that I find myself wishing I had read years ago,) I came across this convicting assessment of American culture – an indictment that sadly is also widely applicable to a wide swath of American Evangelicalism:
“The majority of Americans will tell any pollster that they believe in the Ten Commandments. But only a small percentage of those people could even recite the Ten Commandment; and even a smaller percentage have any genuine interest in following them.”
Ouch!
Winning By Losing
Here are two great quotes from Robert Farrar Capon‘s The Parables of Grace:
“Jesus came to save a lost and losing world by his own lostness and defeat; but in this wide world of losers, everyone except Jesus remains firmly, if hopelessly, committed to salvation by winning… it would be funny if it were not fatal; but fatal it is, because grace works only on those who accept their lostness.”
“As I have observed a number of times now, if the world could have been saved by successful living, it would have been tidied up long ago. Certainly, the successful livers of this world have always been ready enough to stuff life’s losers into the garbage can of history. Their program for turning earth back to Eden has consistently been to shun the sick, to lock the poor in ghettos, to disenfranchise those whose skin was the wrong color, and to exterminate those whose religion was inconvenient… But for all that, Eden has never returned. The world’s woes are beyond repair by the world’s successes: there are just too many failures, and they come too thick and fast for any program, however energetic or well-funded… Therefore when the Gospel is proclaimed, it stays light-years away from reliance on success or any other exercise of right-handed power. Instead, it relies resolutely on left-handed power – on the power that, in a mystery, works through failure, loss, and death… For Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the correctible; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take their stand on a death he can use instead of a life he cannot.”
Shaped Through Suffering
“The suffering that comes to us is not random. It is not just the flow of chance events that careen along without a plan. It is not crazy coincidence. It is not haphazard and undirected. It is easy for us to see suffering as blind chance, or bad luck, or what others are doing to us. It is not karma, bad thing are not coming to us, because we have been bad to others. God makes it clear that all suffering comes according to God’s purposes in our lives. God is at work even when we cannot see him at work.”
~ Tedd Tripp
What’s the Problem?
Writing in 1974, Francis Schaeffer suggested:
“The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.”
No Little People
In other words, for Christians assessing the Culture Wars, the problem is you – and the problem is me.
Jesus Surrendered All
Jesus is the only one who ever could have ever sung “I Surrender All” with total integrity. Let’s trust in Jesus’ once-and-for-all surrender to the cross as the basis of our relationship with God. Our surrender is fickle and incomplete. Jesus’ was perfect and forever.
~ Scotty Smith
My Sin is Ever Before Me
‘My sin is ever before me’ ~ Psalm 51.3
A humble soul sees that he can stay no more from sin, than the heart can from panting, and the pulse from beating. He sees his heart and life to be fuller of sin, than the firmament is of stars; and this keeps him low. He sees that sin is so bred in the bone, that till his bones, as Joseph’s, be carried out of the Egypt of this world, it will not out. Though sin and grace were never born together, and though they shall not die together, yet while the believer lives, these two must live together; and this keeps him humble.
~ Thomas Brooks, English Puritan
GRACE & PEACE 