Category Archives: Quotes

Graceful gleanings

Thanks for looking at my bimonthly blog. With great excitement, much planning is being done for a new church plant which will commence in August, 2009… but that has led to a concommitent decrease in thoughts on practical grace.

Which is a bit grevious… my continued walking as a Christian in the depths of Christ, who he is, what he has done and continues to do for us, is both the theme of this site and the single greatest component of my insignificant life.

I was stopped in my tracks last week by this beautiful little book from C.J. Mahaney, titled The Cross Centered Life. It is a small gift book, only 85 pages, but it was wonderfully refreshing. Here is one of his illustrations, along with a few excellent quotes.

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C.J. Mahaney: “On Monday, Alice bought a parrot. It didn’t talk, so the next day she returned to the pet store. “He needs a ladder,” she was told. She bought a ladder, but another day passed and the parrot still didn’t say a word. “How about a swing?” the clerk suggested. So Alice bought a swing. The next day, a mirror. The next day, a miniature plastic tree. The next day, a shiny parrot toy. On Sunday morning, Alice was standing outside the pet store when it opened. She had the parrot cage in her hand and tears in her eyes. Her parrot was dead. “Did it ever say a word?” the store owner asked.

“Yes,” Alice said through her sobs. “Right before he died, he looked at me and asked, ‘Don’t they sell any food at that pet store?'”

Just as no amount of parrot-cage amentities can make up for a lack of parrot food, nothing can replace the gospel in a Christian’s life. Without it our souls will become like Alice’s pet — starving in a crowded cage.” (The Cross Centered Life, 18-19)

 

D. A. Carson, on Paul: “He cannot long talk about Christian joy, or Christian ethics, or Christian fellowship, or the Christian doctrine of God, or anything else, without finally tying it to the cross. Paul is gospel-centered; he is cross centered.” (The Cross & Christian Ministry, 38)

Sinclair Ferguson: “The evangelical orientation is inward and subjective. We are far better at looking inward than we are at looking outward. Instead, we need to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing and extolling Jesus Christ.”

Also Ferguson: “Our greatest temptation and mistake is to try to smuggle character into God’s work of grace.” (Know Your Christian Life, 73)

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May we continue to grow in the incredible grace and knowledge of our Savior!

Graceful Thoughts III

Here’s a brief quote from J.I. Packer’s Knowing God (p. 250-251). My wife has been blessed with a recent book study on this classic Christian text, and occasionally shares a wonderful nugget. Enjoy!

“This is what all the work of [God’s] grace aims at – an ever deeper knowledge of God, and an ever closer fellowship with him. Grace is God drawing us sinners closer and closer to himself.

“How does God in grace prosecute this purpose? Not by shielding us from assault by the world, the flesh, and the devil, nor by protecting us from burdensome and frustrating circumstances… but rather by exposing us to all these things, so as to overwhelm us with a sense of our own inadequacy, and to drive us to cling to him more closely. This is the ultimate reason, from our standpoint, why God fills our lives with troubles and perplexities of one sort and another: it is to ensure that we shall learn to hold him fast.”

“This truth has many applications. One of the most startling is that God actually uses our sins and mistakes to this end. He employs the educative discipline of failures and mistakes very frequently. It is striking to see how much of the Bible deals with godly people making mistakes and God chastening them for it.”

“… Is your trouble a sense of failure? The knowledge of having made some ghastly mistake? Go back to God; his restoring grace waits for you.”

 

And one brief verse for today:

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV)

Praise be to God for His continued care for us, and His work on us, every day!

Grace in Proverbial Faith

Undoubtedly like you, I can get so excited by a thought as I meditate on Scripture. Some verse comes alive, some thought just burns inside, and I worship my Savior anew.

I was thinking along these lines yesterday, as I thought about Proverbs 3:5-6:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.”

Grace in Proverbs?
Proverbs: skillful living needs grace-given faith!

I became very excited that right here in the middle of Proverbs, which is so often used as a works-based rulebook for living, is a statement of grace.

Do you see it? This critical proverb states that God will make your paths straight if you entirely trust in Him.

How do I do that? How can I possibly trust in the Lord with all my heart? The answer that Scripture clearly presents for me is that I can’t… on my own. There’s no way I can totally trust in God. Romans 3:11, among others, states that I don’t even seek Him, much less trust Him.

So God must give me this all-consuming trust in Him. It’s a gift of grace, this trust.
This trust could be identified with another word: faith.

Another way to say this Proverb would be, “Have faith in God and don’t trust your own works; point to Him, He’ll take care of your life.”

I was thinking about this wondrous idea of faith as God’s gift, and ran across a wonderful passage written by Martin Luther in his commentary on Romans.

Luther writes, “Faith is not what some people think it is… ‘Faith is not enough,’ they say, ‘you must do good works, you must be pious to be saved.’ They think that, when you hear the gospel, you start working, creating by your own strength a thankful heart which says, ‘I believe.’

That description is not faith at all, he argues. Instead, “faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives us new birth from God… it changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers.” This true faith brings the Holy Spirit. This true faith can’t help doing good works all the time, without even stopping to think about it. And again, this faith is God’s work in us, not our own work at all.

Faith is not something you can make for yourself. Faith, to Luther, is “a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.”

He goes on to say that this faith is grounded in grace: “Such confidence and knowledge of God’s grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures.”

It is because of this fantastic gift, this gift of faith, we willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, and love and worship God. These latter things are all works, of course… but they are flowing out of and inextricably bound to the gift of faith, our utter whole-hearted trust of the Lord which He has, by His marvelous grace, given us.

So, yes, there is grace even in Proverbs. By grace, given faith – so that in faith I acknowledge Him, and my Lord directs my steps.

To Christ be the glory forever and ever and ever! He has done such wonders for us.

 

[for the interested, the quotes of Martin Luther come from “An Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” from Vermischte Deutche Scriften (1854), trans. Robert Smith, pp. 124-125]

Graceful Thoughts II

I am so thankful to the Lord for stimulating thoughts from other believers. Here are a couple to chew on.

From Tim Keller, in The Reason for God:

“When many first hear the distinction between religion and the gospel, they think that it just sounds too easy. ‘Nice deal!’ they may say. ‘If that is Christianity, all I have to do is get a personal relationship to God and then do anything I want!’ Those words, however, can only be spoken on the outside of an experience of radical grace. No one from the inside speaks like that. In fact, grace can be quite threatening.

Some years ago I met a woman who began coming to church… she said she had gone to church growing up and had never before heard a distinction drawn between the gospel and religion. She had always heard that God accepts us only if we are good enough. She said that the new message was scary. I asked her why it was scary, and she replied:

‘If I was saved by my good works then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with “rights” – I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if I am a sinner saved by sheer grace – then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.’

She understood the dynamic of grace and gratitude. If when you have lost all fear of punishment you also lose all incentive to live a good, unselfish life, then the only incentive you ever had to live a decent life was fear. This woman could see immediately that the wonderful-beyond-belief teaching of salvation by sheer grace had an edge to it. She knew that if she was a sinner saved by grace, she was (if anything) more subject to the sovereign Lordship of God. She knew that if Jesus really had done all this for her, she would not be her own. She would joyfully, gratefully belong to Jesus, who provided all this for her at infinite cost to himself.”

 

And from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in Spiritual Depression:

“The very essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and I am in Him. As long as you go on thinking about yourself saying, ‘I’m not good enough; Oh, I’m not good enough,’ you are denying God – you are denying the gospel – you are denying the very essence of the faith and you will never be happy. You think you’re better at times and then again you will find you are not as good at other times than you thought you were. You will be up and down forever.”

Graceful thoughts

Probably like you, sometimes I run across quotes that are worthy of chewing on… and I usually print them out, set them aside, and forget about them. Instead, perhaps, they can occasionally become a part of conversation. Here’s one such from Michael Horton, writing in “No Church, No Problem?”, Modern Reformation, July/August 2008.



“Christ has not only appointed the message, but the methods and, as we have seen, there is an inseparable connection between them. All around us we see evidence that churches may affirm the gospel of salvation by grace alone in Christ alone through faith alone, but then adopt a methodology that suggests otherwise. Christ has appointed preaching, because ‘faith comes by hearing the word of Christ’ (Rom. 10:17); baptism, because it is the sign and seal of inclusion in Christ; the Supper, because through it we receive Christ and all of his benefits. In other words, these methods are appointed precisely because they are means of grace rather than means of works; means of God’s descent to us rather than means of our ascent to God. 


In this way, Christ makes himself not only the gift, but the giver; not only the object of faith, but the active agent, together with the Spirit, in giving us faith. And he not only gives us this faith in the beginning, but deepens, matures, and increases our faith throughout our lives. The gospel is not something that we need to ‘get saved’ so that we can move on to something else; it is the ‘power of God unto salvation’ throughout our pilgrimage. So we need this gospel to be delivered to us regularly, both for our justification and our sanctification…”