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.”