A Few Words About Grace

Grace

I wonder sometimes how much wisdom we miss in the gathered wisdom of earnest believers in years past. We all know names like Calvin and Luther, but how many other Saints joyfully proclaimed the truth of the Gospel and are never read?

In that vein, I was reading a not-so-old-but-not-contemporary book on Romans by William R. Newell, published in 1938. It happened to be on my shelf, and several sections really caused me to pause and think… in a good way.

So I share a couple of sections with you, from Newell’s Romans Verse By Verse, pp. 246-247. May they also cause you to reflect on the wondrous grace that has been poured out on us in Christ!

 

“A FEW WORDS ABOUT GRACE”

[The first two sections were also good, but I’ve left them out for space constraints.]  

“III. The Proper Attitude of Man under Grace

1.  To believe, and to consent to be loved while unworthy, is the great secret.

2.  To refuse to make “resolutions” and “vows”; for that is to trust in the flesh.

3.  To expect to be blessed, though realizing more and more lack of worth.

4.  To testify of God’s goodness, at all times.

5.  To be certain of God’s future favor; yet to be ever more tender in conscience toward Him.

6.  To rely on God’s chastening hand as a mark of His kindness.

7.  A man under grace, if like Paul, has no burdens regarding himself; but many about others.

 

IV.  Things Which Gracious Souls Discover

1. To “hope to be better” is to fail to see yourself in Christ only.

2. To be disappointed with yourself, is to have believed in yourself.

3. To be discouraged is unbelief,-as to God’s purpose and plan of blessing for you.

4. To be proud, is to be blind! For we have no standing before God, in ourselves.

5. The lack of Divine blessing, therefore, comes from unbelief, and not from failure of devotion.

6. Real devotion to God arises, not from man’s will to show it; but from the discovery that blessing has been received from God while we were yet unworthy and undevoted.

7. To preach devotion first, and blessing second, is to reverse God’s order, and preach law, not grace. The Law made man’s blessing depend on devotion; Grace confers undeserved, unconditional blessing: our devotion may follow, but does not always do so,-in proper measure.”

Graceful Thoughts IV

In Christ, ,
The word of the cross illumines our lives
The word of the cross... is the power of God.

I’ve been thinking alot about the importance of the gospel recently. Particularly I’ve been thinking about how important continuing, increasing knowledge of Jesus Christ is to our ongoing life on earth.  In the midst of this thinking, my wife read me this quote from Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington, in The Great Exchange (p.129):

“Paul declares, ‘The word of the cross is… the power of God’ (1 Cor. 1:18). What a remarkable statement! God’s almighty, supernatural power is connected to a specific ‘word’ – the message of the cross – the preaching of the great facts of Christ’s atoning sacrifice as the provision of God’s love for guilty sinners. When this gospel of Christ’s great atonement is preached, God’s miraculous power to regenerate, restore, and renew sinners is displayed in those who are saved by it.

“This is the true gospel, the only gospel that unleashes the power of God by which those dead in sin are saved from the guilt, the consequences, and the enslaving power of their sin. Therefore, Paul was ‘not ashamed of the gospel’ because this message of the cross ‘is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek’ (Rom. 1:16). Substitute anything for the cross or add anything to the cross, whether good works or human philosophy, and the preaching is stripped of God’s power – for it is no longer God’s message. It ceases to be the gospel.”

 I liked the “word of the cross” being the power of God… may we never add to or take away what our Savior has paid for. Blessings!

In Step with the Truth of the Gospel of Grace

Grace,

But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (Galatians 2:14)

Galatians is a wonderful epistle where Paul vibrantly defends the gospel of grace. One well-known episode that Paul describes is his confrontation with Peter. Peter, after salvation, decided that he should start making differentiation between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians.

Paul “opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned” (Galatians 2:11). Peter was condemned because he was hypocritically acting as if a man were justified by the works of the law, not through faith in Christ.

Remember, this is after Peter’s conversion.

So it is possible to act in such a way, after we become Christians, that we with our actions deny the wondrous truth of salvation by faith alone.

By inspiration, Paul has a wondrous way of referring to Peter’s actions. “They were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel,” he says (Galatians 2:14). Literally the verse could be translated, “they did not walk uprightly with the truth of the gospel.”

If even Peter, the first of the apostles, could walk out of step with the good news of Jesus Christ, then perhaps we also can. We don’t make distinction between Jewish and Gentile believers, but we can also not be straightforward with the truth of the gospel.

• Do you feel like a better person when you’ve had a quiet time, read your Bible, been to church? Is God happier with you in these times? Perhaps you’re getting assurance not from Christ but from self.

• Do you think that not living up to certain standards makes a person an unbeliever? A backslider? Perhaps you’re making distinctions like Peter.

• Do you feel depressed and guilty when you don’t live up to behaviors that you would like to? Perhaps you’re applying Peter’s distinctions to your own life, and missing the gospel.

• Do you think you’re not so bad – as compared to others? Perhaps you are missing the depth of what Christ has done. Without proper perspective on the depth of sin, our own efforts can be much magnified.

Peter’s problem – and ours – was why he was trying to go back and keep the moral law. Making distinction over the keeping of the law – as opposed to the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross – was cheapening true grace. Making God’s approval (and salvation) contingent on personal morality rather than the work of Christ led to Peter’s condemnation.

Having begun by the Spirit, we know that we are not being perfected by the flesh (Galatians 3:3). We are being perfected by the Spirit, in the ongoing work of our increasing knowledge of what Jesus Christ has done for us, which produces the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control. We gladly respond to the wondrous truth of the gospel.

May we never stray from this wondrous grace. And if we do, like Peter may we quickly return.

To our Savior be the glory, forever and ever.

Grace in Truth

Grace, ,
Though inconvenient for some, truth exists!
Amazing... truth exists

Knowing truth is grace from God.

“Postmodern” has become something of a bad term in Christian circles. The general claim of postmodernity is that absolute truth is impossible to establish. We are too bound up in our subjective points of view, in our experiences and cultural limitations, to really be able to have a claim to objective truth.

If you think about it for a while, there is something to be said for the humility that this viewpoint entails. If I become less sure of my own perspective as the only truth, I’m less likely to impose my way of thinking rigidly on everyone around me. Science seems to have grasped at least a portion of this. It deals in hypotheses, not absolute truth; even the most dearly held theorems and “truths” are actually not, at their core, stated as absolutes.

Although postmodernity is wrong, it highlights that truth itself is an incredible grace from God.

I don’t mean the concept of truth. I mean actual truth. Truth that is correspondence to reality, the reality of the One who matters, our creator God. God has chosen to give humanity His Word, His Truth. This truth isn’t only a set of propositions, but narrative, metaphor, and ultimately relationship. Truth for us is made possible because the Holy Spirit opens eyes and biblical revelation leads to lives that are submitted to God’s reality. Truth is possible because true reality actually isn’t my perception, or your perception, but how things really are in the eyes of the only One who can be truly objective: our saving, redeeming, creating, judging, all-powerful God.

I know that’s a heady paragraph. But the Bible clearly affirms truth, and links it to grace. Colossians 1:6 says that truth is the way in which we understood the gospel of the grace of Christ. John 1:17 proclaims that grace and truth came to us in Jesus Christ. John 1:14 declares that His glory is full of grace and truth.

Our salvation is based on belief in actual truth. 2 Thessalonians 2:13 proclaims that “God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.” This verse clearly assumes that there is an actual truth, and belief in that truth is what, along with the Spirit’s work of sanctification, is what saves.

Grace and truth, connected to salvation and Jesus Christ.

All this isn’t just for the theologian. Our lives, spent in study of the Word, prayer, communion, and devoted following after Christ, are being more and more molded into the true reality – the reality of relationship with our Savior. We get to more and more see the world as He sees it; more and more have our own personal subjectivities submitted to Biblical reality. Our lives in Christ more and more resound with the reality of the living God.

Truth matters. The Bible is God’s truth, not only in proposition, but in its being used by the Holy Spirit to shape our understanding of reality into what reality actually is. Postmodernity is right in that I, a fallen human being, could never understand true reality. It takes a perfect God, who does know and understand all reality, to declare what truth is.

That our God would go to the effort of not allowing us to simply live in our “rational” self-deluded state, but break through our blindness, patiently direct us and mold us and grow us more and more into correspondence to what reality is: this is amazing grace.

The grace of truth.

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17).

Graceful Thoughts III

Quotes,

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!

Absolute Security

Grace, ,
An oft-needed remembrance of the New Covenant
What does communion have to do with security?

My Lord is so constantly good to me that I take it for granted. I’m thinking today that when I get to heaven, I’ll fall and worship as I become aware of all the ways that my wondrous Savior protected and delivered me while I blissfully went about my oft self-centered life.

As the popular song goes, “I can only imagine…”

I was struck anew by the depth of my Savior’s love for me as I thought about “covenant” this weekend. I was reading 1 Samuel 18-20, where David is in such trouble. God delivers him time after time, but it seems like David’s always getting away from Saul by the skin of his teeth. (Do teeth have skin? I guess that’s probably the point.)

So David turns to the one he can absolutely trust: Jonathan.

Why could he trust Jonathan? 1 Samuel 20:8 tells us, as David says, “Therefore you shall deal kindly with your servant, for you have brought your servant into a covenant of Yahweh with you.”

David knew he could absolutely trust Jonathan, because of the depth of covenant faithfulness. Jonathan’s covenant (a covenant before God) meant David had one person he could absolutely trust.

When circumstances are going haywire, when the world seems against me, when other friends seem distant, when there’s nowhere else to go… David knew where to go. To the one he had a covenant with.

I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to see that the text in 1 Samuel is pointing us to the security of a true covenant.

As a New Testament believer, I know that I have this kind of relationship with someone. A covenant relationship. The word is used 33 times in the New Testament, particularly to refer to what Jesus Christ has done.

Jesus Christ is “the guarantee of a better covenant” (Hebrews 7:22). Jesus is the “mediator of a new covenant” (Hebrews 9:15), a covenant that the only true God makes with those who put their faith in Christ (Hebrews 10:16-23).

There is a depth of faithfulness, not by me, but for me. Because the covenant giver promises steadfast love to the receiver of that covenant. And we have received a new covenant from God himself.

So no matter what I’ve done, no matter what scrape I’m in, no matter how frightened I’ve allowed myself to be in this world, I know where to go for help. For faithful love. For merciful care. For security. I go to the one true God, through Jesus Christ.

Because of the covenant He has extended to me.

This steadfast faithfulness of God toward me is something I’m so prone to forget. So I have to remind myself all the time. God is so gracious to me, not because of my adequacy, but because of His covenant (2 Corinthians 4:4-6).

Thankfully, God knows that I am prone to discount His faithfulness. So He’s given me, us, a constant reminder. It’s called communion.

Look at what communion is a reminder of:

Luke 22:20: “And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.'”

1 Corinthians 11:25: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.”

When I remember the blood of Christ, I’m remembering the new covenant. I’m remembering that God himself has declared covenant faithfulness to me. I can trust in His loving care. I can rest in His fantastic mercy.

O, the depths of the riches and the kindness of God. How unsearchable His ways! How wondrous is His grace!

In the words of D. Ralph Davis, a commentator on 1 Samuel,
“Security is an eight-letter word. It is spelled C-O-V-E-N-A-N-T.”

Praise be to the mediator of the New Covenant!

Grace in Proverbial Faith

Grace, In Christ, Quotes,

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]

Peace, by Grace

Grace, In Christ, peace, ,

I had a few moments with my wonderful little girls today. Hope is a whirlwind; she plays at fifty miles an hour, leaving behind her a wake of crayons, plastic toys, and cardboard books (the paper ones are not durable enough for her yet!). Grace adds to the ruckus with her own sounds and actions of pre-toddler chaos.When I finally sat down after putting them both in their respective nap areas, I sat down on the couch and reached for Job (coincidence, surely).

Finally, I thought, peace.

Peace... more than quiet beauty!
A beautiful, peaceful lake... but true peace is even better!

But what I really meant was, finally – quiet. And I caught myself as I thought it, too. Wait! Quietness is not peace… peace is so much more than quiet. What a wondrous thought… I truly have peace, all day long! Peace when Hope is bounding on the sofa; peace when Grace wails; peace when I’m tired, peace when I’m busy. Peace with every breath I take.

The concept of peace is so wonderful, I can’t really get my arms around it.

In my head, I know that it was the very pinnacle of goodness in the Old Testament. It’s our translation of the Hebrew word “shalom,” which carries the flavor of rightness, of wellness, of a deep abiding sense of properness.

That kind of peace has an object: God. True peace is peace with God.

What does this peace have to do with grace?

Well… it is by grace that I have that peace today, and every day. Even if I don’t feel it, even if I sinned against God today, even if I overslept my quiet time, even if I start to get weary of service and daily living… I know deep in my soul I have peace, rightness, goodness, wellness, with my God.

How do I know that? Because I believe the Bible. I believe what my Savior has done for me.

Jesus proclaimed to those who believe in Him that He was leaving us peace: “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful” (John 14:27).

This peace is a direct result of reconciliation. Reconciliation is the putting back together of what was broken apart, what was at war, at enmity. That was me and God, due to my sin. But look what Jesus did, through the cross: it was God’s pleasure “through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross.” (Colossians 1:20)

So I have peace. Peace forever. Because of the atoning work of Jesus Christ.
Because of grace.

John Bunyon writes in his biography, Grace Abounding, that the peace-producing grace of Colossians 1:20 is what broke through his efforts at religion to actually touch his heart. It was this peace, by Christ’s work alone, which broke him of thinking of his life as keeping religious rules and regulations.

The grace of the atonement is so important that C.H. Spurgeon said, “I believe that if I should preach to you the atonement of our Lord Jesus, and nothing else, twice every Sabbath day, my ministry would not be unprofitable. Perhaps it might be more profitable than it is.”

The atonement is a fantastically deep topic for another day. Today I just remain reveling in peace. Peace through the grace of Christ, which has brought that peace to me forever.

Because this peace is the result of His atonement, and rests solely on His finished work in His life and sacrifice for me, I can’t lose it. This true peace doesn’t depend on me. Rather, it motivates me to lay down my life for Him.

In the quiet of children’s naps, I exult in it.
In the rush of today’s concerns, I lean on it.

“And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation” (Romans 5:11).

Grace and peace to you!

Religion, Gospel, Identity

Grace, In Christ, Righteousness,

Who am I?Just a quick thought stimulated by a recent book by Tim Keller (The Reason for God) that our church is reading in a men’s group.

I like the thought (which he makes) of distinguishing between religion and gospel. Religion as a whole pushes one toward salvation through moral effort. The Gospel is about salvation through grace, entirely by the work of another, Jesus Christ.

So there’s two ways to reject that gospel, that good news. Both ways are essentially being your own Lord and Savior.

The first way is to be a rebel: “I can live my life just how I want to!” This is obviously a desire to be one’s own Lord.

The second way is also to be a rebel… internally: “I can trust my own goodness, avoid sin, and live morally so God blesses me!” This is the same rebellion as the first, really – I will decide for myself the mode and method of God’s grace. I won’t submit to the way of Christ. This second rebel is who Jesus addressed throughout the gospels… folks we usually refer to as Pharisees.

Both ways of rebelling are a rejection of the gospel. You really can avoid Jesus as Savior as much by trying to keep all the rules you find in the Bible as by ignoring them.

I wonder how many of us are really Pharisees… internally driven by despair caused by sin, with no identity as a truly righteous adopted child, united to the Son of God through the blood and sacrifice of that Son, Jesus Christ. Pharisees… always wondering if we’re good enough, always comparing selves with others, always realizing that the inside doesn’t match the outside.

May we never build our identity on our moral achievements (religion), just as we rightly flee from building our identity on our job, our hobby, or our spouse. May our identity be foundationally grounded on the rock that is a relationship with Jesus Christ, the living God.

“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live I in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Who I was, my self-identity, self-righteousness, self-orientation – he is dead. My only hope is Christ. May I not return to trusting in who I was, in what that flesh through its own effort could do. May I trust wholly in Christ, in what He has done. By God’s Word and His mercy toward me, I know this is the gospel of grace.

Galatians 2:20 says that our life now is by faith in the Son of God. The content of that faith is that His righteousness truly does save me, that I have an eternal future with Him. My life now is wholly given over to Him, not as effort for more righteousness of my own, but for grateful living in His ways, building up other people, worshiping this God. The fruit of my mouth, praising Him; the fruit of my life, shining forth the result of the Spirit working in me. United to Christ forever.

Identity found!

Grace in Providence

Grace, Providence,

Lost: Donkeys... Found: Kingdom
Lost: Donkeys… Found: Kingdom

I was struck again today at how our God uses the small, seemingly insignificant minutiae of our lives to mold us, to shape us, to grow us… and to glorify Himself. We have such a wonderful, strange, unknowable, un-figure-out-able God!

This is all over the Bible. But one example is in 1 Samuel 9. It’s a typical day in the life of a farmer… who loses his donkeys. So his son, Saul, goes looking for them with a servant. They look, and look. No donkeys. So one says, ‘Hey, I’ve heard there’s a prophet in the town nearby where we’ve ended up, let’s go ask him where the donkeys are.’

Well, how random can the Bible get? Donkey searches? What does grace have to do with donkeys that can’t be found?

Because the account in 1 Samuel then notes, ‘Now the Lord had told Samuel (the prophet) in his ear the day before Saul came…’ (9:15). That’s right. The day before, the Lord had arranged it all.

So what appeared as a random act of lost donkeys (who unlocked the gate!?!) actually was absolutely planned by God. And Saul, in looking for his donkeys, is brought to Samuel to be annointed king of Israel.

He does that, our Savior. He uses insignificant events and daily life to move and grow and bless us. He uses seemingly insignificant events to bring about His purposes.

Proverbs 16:9 says “A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.”
Proverbs 20:24 echoes, “A man’s steps are of the Lord.”

What’s happening with your donkeys today? Is not God in charge of you, graciously using the circumstances of your life for your good? Our Lord is so fantastically, providentially good to us!

So in reality there is no such thing as an insignificant day, no boring, unprofitable hours for the believer. May that not drain us (Oh no, God is watching!) but may our Lord’s providential grace expand our hearts as we rest in the goodness and love of our Savior.