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Legalism in Light of the Gospel

/ Dennis Griffith / 3 Comments

In light of the gospel, let me especially demolish the myth that legalism is a blunder that’s associated only with our initial salvation—with our positional justification in God’s eyes. Most believers realize we could never earn such salvation; we’ve come to accept that no one can work his way into God’s kingdom… .

But when it comes to our sanctification, suddenly we become legalists. In the matter of maturing in Christlikeness—and in continuing to please God and find favor with God and acceptance with God—we suppose it’s all about what we have to accomplish ourselves and all the rules and standards and values we need to adhere to. We seem to inherently assume that our performance is what will finally determine whether our relationship with God is good or bad: so much good behavior from us generates so much affection from God, or so much bad behavior from us generates so much anger from God.

We get the Christian life all backwards. It subtly becomes all about us and what we do (which leads to slavery) instead of being all about Jesus and what he’s done (which leads to freedom). We may not articulate all this theologically, but it sure comes out in the way we live.

By their behavior, legalists essentially are saying this: “I live the Christian life by the rules—rules that I establish for myself as well as those I expect others to abide by.” They develop specific requirements of behavior beyond what the Bible teaches, and they make observance of those requirements the means by which they judge the acceptability of others in the church.

We’ve all become pretty adept at establishing these rules and standards that we find personally achievable. Legalism therefore provides us with a way to avoid acknowledging our deficiencies and our inabilities. That’s enough right there to make it attractive to us. But it’s also appealing to us in how it puffs us up, giving us the illusion … that we can do it—we can generate our own meaning, our own purpose, our own security, and all our other inmost needs. It’s what Michael Horton pinpoints as “the default setting of the human heart: the religion of self-salvation.”

It’s all so attractive because it’s all about us. Legalism feeds our natural pride. While abiding by our self-established standards and rules, we think pretty highly of ourselves …. And what’s especially fine about being in charge of our situation (though we wouldn’t admit it) is that it’s a way to avoid Jesus.

~ Tullian Tchividjian, from Jesus + Nothing = Everything

Appropriating the Justifying Work of Christ

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives.

Many have so light an apprehension of God’s holiness and of the extent and guilt of their sin, that consciously they see little need for justification. Below the surface, however, they are deeply guilt-ridden and insecure. Many others have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification….drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity…their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience.

Few start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.

~ Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life

Effect of Coming Empty Handed

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

“As we come to Christ…empty-handed, claiming no merit of our own, but clinging by faith to His blood and righteousness, we are justified. We pass immediately from a state of condemnation and spiritual death to a state of pardon, acceptance, and the sure hope of eternal life. Our sins are blotted out, and we are “clothed” with the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

In our standing before God, we will never be more righteous, even in heaven, than we were the day we trusted Christ, or we are now.

Obviously in our daily experience we fall far short of the perfect righteousness God requires. But because He has imputed to us the perfect righteousness of His Son, He now sees us as being just as righteous as Christ Himself,”

 ~ Jerry Bridges, The Gospel for Real Life

This Present Communion

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

“We are justified if we have accepted Christ as Savior.  But present communion with God requires continual bowing in both the intellect and the will.  Without bowing in the intellect, in thinking after God; without acting upon the finished work of Christ in my present life; and without bowing in the will in practice, as the waves of the present life break over me, there is no sufficient communion with God.  Without these things I am not in my place as the creature in a fallen and abnormal world.  These three things are absolutely necessary if there is to be real and sufficient communion with God in the present life.”

~Francis Schaeffer

The Glory of the Gospel

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

The Gospel would not be good news if it did not reveal the glory of Christ for us to see and savor. It is the glory of Christ that finally satisfies our soul. We are made for Christ, and Christ died so that every obstacle would be removed that keeps us from seeing and savoring the most satisfying treasure in the universe—namely, Christ, who is the image of God.

~ John Piper, God is the Gospel, p. 62.

A Right Definition of Faith

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

How shall we distinguish a healthy faith from one that is built on more shaky ground?  Consider this insight from John Calvin:

“Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit…..

If then, we would be assured that God is pleased with and [is] kindly disposed toward us, we must fix our eyes …on Christ…  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.”

Worship is the Proper Response

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so. This side of the Fall, human worship of God properly responds to the redemptive provisions that God has graciously made. While all true worship is God-centered, Christian worship is no less Christ-centered. Empowered by the Spirit and in line with the stipulations of the new covenant, it manifests itself in all our living, finding its impulse in the gospel, which restores our relationship with our Redeemer-God and therefore also with our fellow image-bearers, our co-worshippers. Such worship therefore manifests itself both in adoration and action, both in the individual believer and in corporate worship, which is worship offered up in the context of the body of believers, who strive to align all the forms of the devout ascription of all worth to God with the panoply of new covenant mandates and examples that bring to fulfillment the glories of antecedent revelation and anticipate the consummation.

~ D.A. Carson, in Worship By the Book

Every Church Missional

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Every church is called to be a “missional church”. The fact that we have turned the word mission into an adjective testifies to the American church’s frayed ecclesiology. A non-missional church is not a church in the first place, but in a culture largely devoid of theological vocabulary, this language has become necessary to remind us that the church exists not for ourselves, but for the world.

– Kenda Creasy Dean, in Almost Christian

Currents of Repentance

/ Dennis Griffith / 16 Comments

 

 “If all we do in our meditations is to repent of a few petty acts called sins that have accumulated over the last day (and this is not to belittle the importance of doing that), we have not known the deep power of purifying grace that repentance is supposed to offer.  Israel and its stories help me to understand the deep underlying currents of evil response and intent, the tragic aquifers far beneath my conscious life that will continually feed my daily life with impurity unless they are identified and replaced with alternatives of the kind of character God built into Abraham.”    

– Gordon MacDonald

Ancient Prayer

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Here is a beautiful description of prayer from my friend John Smed:

“In believing prayer, we learn to connect our present troubles to the good and perfect will of God.  We refuse to believe that chance rules our lives.  We withstand the temptation to imagine that God is capricious or malicious.  We know he has a higher purpose and that he is not dealing with us as our sins deserve. As we bring our troubles to Jesus in prayer—asking his will to be done—we approve the will of our Father in heaven. We see our sufferings in the greater reality of his good, acceptable, and perfect will.  In prayer we “turn crisis to Christ.”  Our heart becomes tuned to his heart and we sing the song of grace.”

– John Smed is Senior Pastor of Grace – Vancouver. He is also a Consultant/Trainer with Global Church Advancement (GCA). 

Explosive Power of the Gospel

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

“The Gospel is God’s explosive power that changes everything.

The gospel makes us Christians….  God forgives your sin, declares you righteous in Christ, gives you eternal life, adopts you as His child, and ushers you into an intimate relationship with Himself, through the Holy Spirit.

Secondly, the gospel grows us.  The gospel is not merely the way we enter, it is the way we make all progress…it is the ‘way of righteousness from first to last.’…  Since the gospel not only makes us Christians, but also grows us as Christians, the most desperate need of both unbelievers and believers… is to hear and appropriate the Gospel to their lives.

Thirdly, the gospel empowers us to serve…with a whole new motivational structure…setting us free to love and serve unconditionally in response to God’s grace in Christ”.

-Dick Kaufmann

Benefitting in the Benefactor

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Sinclair Ferguson offers this wise insight about the gospel-centered life:

“…we must never separate the benefits (regeneration, justification, sanctification) from the Benefactor (Jesus Christ). The Christians who are most focused on their own spirituality may give the impression of being the most spiritual … but from the New Testament’s point of view, those who have almost forgotten about their own spirtuality because their focus is so exclusively on their union with Jesus Christ and what He has accomplished are those who are growing and exhibiting fruitfulness. Historically speaking, whenever the piety of a particular group is focused on OUR spirituality that piety will eventually exhaust itself on its own resources. Only where our piety forgets about ourself and focuses on Jesus Christ will our piety nourished by the ongoing resources the Spirit brings to us from the source of all true piety, our Lord Jesus Christ.”