Jesus Is LORD
Eternity Bible College
Note for my Readers:
If thou findest me short in things, impute that to my love of brevity.
If thou findest me besides the truth in aught [any respect], impute that to my infirmity.
But if thou findest anything here that serves to your furtherance and joy of the faith, impute that to the mercy of God bestowed on thee and me.
Yours to serve you with what little I have.
- John Bunyan
The Gospel is not moral conformity, religion, neither is it self discovery, secularism. The Gospel brings restructure of the heart, removal of our sin, and reversal of our values.
- Tim Keller
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Showing posts tagged Ray Ortlund
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What’s the Key to Healthy Christian Growth in Godliness?
That’s the question I asked a handful of thoughtful men of God last week. Responses below.
Please understand: I explicitly asked our brothers to keep it to a single, short sentence. Of course, whole volumes could be (and have been!) written addressing this question (here’s my favorite). So we gladly receive these wise statements remembering that sanctification is not a math problem. There is no formula. Every answer below needs a hundred footnotes. Point taken.
The purpose of this exercise is not to provide an opportunity to nit-pick but to re-center, refresh, encourage, spur on, help one another.
Thabiti Anyabwile:‘If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.’ (Col. 3:1)
I believe the key to healthy Christian growth in godliness is a deep life in the Word of God (Psalm 1:1-3) in which we are encountered by Christ, the Living Word (John 5:39-40, Col. 3:16), in whom we find all the fullness of God himself (Col. 1:19, 2 Cor. 1:20, and a hundred other verses).
Trusting and enjoying God as your Father, living as his son/daughter, on account of Christ’s work.
The key is to treasure Jesus Christ, for that will be where your heart is.
Growth in godliness is not character-centered but Christ-centered, a constant expression of repentance and faith in the person and work of Jesus.
Radical, unreserved love for Jesus Christ manifested in obedient intimacy.
Jesus. Mercy. Tears. A friend. Time.
Sean Lucas:
The key to healthy Christian growth in godliness is to live out of the reality of your union with Christ.
Doug Moo:The constant, disciplined practice of reminding ourselves who we are in Christ.
Self-determination is a myth.
The key to healthy (un-Pharisaical, un-ugly) Christian growth is the thing you believed when you first became a Christian, which delivers you into that deep rest and rightness and OK-ness before God, and which exposes sin as counterfeits which can’t match Christ’s righteousness.
The key to healthy Christian growth in godliness is experiencing the grace and glory of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
Applying the interruptive ‘But now’ of Romans 3:21 to my heart moment by moment.
We must have an increasing sense of our unworthiness before God by ourselves and an increasing sense of our own acceptance from God in Christ.
The key to healthy Christian growth in godliness is faithful attention to gospel preaching.
Tim Savage:
Having the strength to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ in us (cf. Eph. 3:18).
Tom Schreiner:The key to growth is trust in God, and faith comes from hearing God’s word.
I’ve become convinced from Scripture and experience that personal spiritual growth is rooted in participation in a healthy church; personal growth comes from community growth.
A lively sense of all that Christ is for us and all that is ours in Him.
Healthy Christian growth in godliness doesn’t primarily come from trying harder but from enjoying more; or again, pleasure in God is the power for purity in life.
The key to healthy growth in godliness is to seek and to enjoy fellowship with the Father, in union with Christ, through the power of the Spirit, in accordance with the Word, with the body of Christ.
I believe the key to healthy growth in godliness is the cultivation and exercise of Scripture-saturated prayer by which we express and experience our dependence on, joy in, and work through Jesus Christ.
The key to healthy growth in godliness is to be an active, serving member of a local church where the gospel is preached and the eldership care about nurturing the congregation as outward-looking, humble servants of Christ.
Growing knowledge of and love for God, particularly as revealed in Christ and through the Scriptures, that re-structures one’s mind and enflames one’s heart, resulting in increasing transformation into Christ-like character.
As pat as the answer may sound, the key to healthy Christian growth in godliness is submissive study of the Scriptures.
Hard work in response to Christ’s cross.
Good answers, brothers! Thought-provoking and helpful. Thank you for serving us in this way.
(My own response would be something like: Resolutely enjoying our full and free justification from God in Christ, in the shadow of which all the beckoning functional justifications of the world lose their vice-like grip on our hearts.)
God grant us grace to move forward with the glad abandon of faith in September 2010 as never before.- Dane Ortlund, Senior Editor in the Bible division at Crossway Books
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It would un-Jesus him
“If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.” 2 Timothy 2:13
“I tell you, if he were to shut you out, dear soul, whoever you may be, if you go to him, he would deny himself. He never did deny himself yet. Whenever a sinner comes to him he becomes his Savior. Whenever he meets a sick soul he acts as his Physician… . If you go to him you will find him at home and on the look-out for you. He will be more glad to receive you than you will be to be received… . As Matthew sat at the receipt of custom, waiting for the people to pay their dues, so does Christ sit at the receipt of sinners, waiting for them to mention their wants. He is watching for you. I tell you again that he cannot reject you. That would be to alter his whole character and un-Christ himself. To spurn a coming sinner would un-Jesus him and make him to be somebody else and not himself any longer. ‘He cannot deny himself.’ Go and try him; go and try him.”
C. H. Spurgeon, Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), III:862.
Blessings,
David Jee [Eternity Bible College] -
Upheld by the prayers of his people
“And who and what are ministers themselves? Frail men, fallible, sinning men, exposed to every snare, to temptation in every form; and from the very post of observation they occupy, the fairer mark for the fiery darts of the foe. They are no mean victims the great Adversary is seeking, when he would wound and cripple Christ’s ministers. One such victim is worth more to the kingdom of darkness than a score of common men; and on this very account, the temptations are probably more subtle and severe than those encountered by ordinary Christians. If this subtle Deceiver fails to destroy them, he artfully aims at neutralizing their influence by quenching the fervor of their piety, lulling them into negligence, and doing all in his power to render their work irksome. How perilous the condition of that minister then, whose heart is not encouraged, whose hands are not strengthened, and who is not upheld by the prayers of his people! It is not in his own closet and on his own knees alone that he finds security and comfort and ennobling, humbling and purifying thoughts and joys; but it is when his people also seek them in his behalf that he becomes a better and happier man and a more useful minister of the everlasting gospel.”
Gardiner Spring, The Power of the Pulpit (Edinburgh, 1986), pages 223-224.
If your pastor is struggling, and you are not praying for him, the failure is yours too. If your pastor is succeeding, and you are praying for him, the victory is yours together.
Blessings,
David Jee [Eternity Bible College] -
This is that mystery
“This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ’s, and the righteousness of Christ not Christ’s but ours. He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it; and he has taken our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them.”
“Learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to pray to him and, despairing of yourself, say, ‘Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am thy sin. Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine. Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not.’”
Martin Luther
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Don’t ask questions, just believe?
“But someone will say, ‘Didn’t Jesus say that, to be saved, you have to be as a little child?’ Of course he did. But did you ever see a little child who didn’t ask questions? People who use this argument must never have listened to a little child or been one. My four children gave me a harder time with their endless flow of questions than university people ever have… . What Jesus was talking about is that the little child, when he has an adequate answer, accepts the answer. He has the simplicity of not having a built-in grid whereby, regardless of the validity of the answer, he rejects it.”
Francis A. Schaeffer, “Form and Freedom in the Church.”
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Teaspoon Christianity
“For those of us who have been Christians for a while, it becomes easy to think that we’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities of the Christian life. We can settle into a routine of activities at church and in our small groups and Bible studies, with little expectation of anything new. The familiar becomes the predictable, and everything from here on out will be more of the same. We dip our teaspoon into the vast ocean of the living God. Holding that teaspoon in our hand, we say, ‘This is God.’ we pour it out into our lives, and we say,’This is the Christian experience.’
God calls us to dive into the ocean. He call us into ever new regions of his fullness, his immensity, his all-sufficiency. There is more for us in Christ than we have yet apprehended. Let’s never think that we have him figured out or that we’ve seen all he can do. The Bible is not a guidebook to a theological museum. It is a road map showing us the way into neglected or even forgotten glories of the living God.”
- Ray Ortlund, When God Comes to ChurchBlessings,
David Jee [Eternity Bible College] -
Strengthened by grace
You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. 2 Timothy 2:1
“First, then, there is a call to be strong. Timothy was weak; Timothy was timid. Yet he was called to a position of leadership in the church – and in an area in which Paul’s authority was rejected. It is as if Paul said to him, ‘Listen Timothy, never mind what other people say, never mind what other people think, never mind what other people do; you are to be strong. Never mind how shy you feel, never mind how weak you feel; you are to be strong.’ That is the first thing.
Second, you are to be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. If the exhortation had simply been ‘be strong,’ it would have been absurd indeed. You might as well tell a snail to be quick or a horse to fly as to tell a weak man to be strong or a shy man to be brave. But Paul’s calling Timothy to fortitude is a Christian and not a stoical exhortation. Timothy was not to be strong in himself. He was not just to grit his teeth and clench his fists and set his jaw. No, he was, as the Greek literally means, to be strengthened with the grace that is in Christ Jesus, to find his resources for Christian service not in his own nature but in the grace of Jesus Christ.”
John Stott, Urbana 1967. Italics original.
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