What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?
J. Gresham Machen, Christian Faith in the Modern World, 57
(via Of First Importance)
God made man small and the universe big to say something about Himself…The disproportion between us and the universe is a parable about the disproportion between us and God. And it is an understatement. But the point is not to nullify us but to glorify Him.
It is impossible to forgive someone if you feel superior to him or her.
It’s great to be reminded of how much is packed into two verses you might otherwise glaze over. How often do we do any of these?
“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.”—1 Corinthians 15:1-2
Thanks to Justin Taylor for posting this.
Click the title to see the full article.
4. The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel. The basic concepts of the gospel — sin, guilt and accountability before God, the sacrifice of the cross, human nature, afterlife — are becoming culturally strange in the west for the first time in 1500 years. As Lesslie Newbigin has written, it is time now to ‘think like a missionary’—to formulate ways of communicating the gospel that both confront and engage our increasingly non-Christian western culture.
How do we make the gospel culturally accessible without compromising it? How can we communicate it and live it in a way that is comprehensible to people who lack the basic ‘mental furniture’ to even understand the essential truths of the Bible?
… Where Christian faith is offered as a means of finding personal wholeness rather than holiness, the church has become worldly.
There are many other forms of worldliness that are comfortably at home in the evangelical church today. Where it substitutes intuition and feelings for biblical truth, it is being worldly. Where its appetite for the Word has been lost in favor of light discourses and entertainment, it is being worldly. Where it has restructured what it is and what it offers around the rhythms of consumption, it is being worldly, for customers are actually sinners whose place in the church is not to be explained by a quest for self-satisfaction but by a need for repentance. Where it cares more about success than about faithfulness, more about size than spiritual health, it is being worldly. Where the centrality of God to worship is lost amidst the need to be distracted and to have fun, the church is being worldly because it is simply accommodating itself to the preeminent entertainment culture in the world. Is it not odd that in so many church services each Sunday, services that are ostensibly about worshiping God, those in attendance may not be obliged to think even once about his greatness, grace, and commands? Worship in such contexts often has little or nothing to do with God.
Really excited to be in ReTrain and studying Christology with Dr. Bruce Ware.
Because of this, what distinguishes each Person of the Godhead from each other is not and cannot be the divine nature of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This—the one and undivided divine nature—is possessed equally, eternally, simultaneously, and fully by each of the three Persons of the Godhead. So, what distinguishes the Son from Father and Spirit is not the divine nature of the Son. This (divine nature) is possessed also equally and fully by the Father and Spirit. What distinguishes the Son is his particular roles in relation to the Father and Spirit, and the relationships that he has with each of them. What, then, characterizes the distinct roles and relationships of the Son in relation to the Father and Spirit?
