The blessing of Christ’s kingly office for us

“The happiness promised us in Christ does not consist in outward advantages—such as leading a joyous and peaceful life, having rich possessions, being safe from all harm, and abounding with delights such as the flesh commonly longs after. No, our happiness belongs to the heavenly life.

Christ enriches his people with all things necessary for the eternal salvation of souls and fortifies them with courage to stand unconquerable against all the assaults of spiritual enemies. From this we infer that he rules—inwardly and outwardly—more for our own sake than his.

Thus it is that we may patiently pass through this life with its misery, hunger, cold, contempt, reproaches, and other troubles—content with this one thing: that our King will never leave us destitute, but will provide for our needs until, our warfare ended, we are called to triumph.”

—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion,
from Of First Importance

Prop-egg-anda

laughing baby

So cute.

gospel-motivated love

“When my mind is fixed on the gospel, I have ample stimulation to show God’s love to other people. For I am always willing to show love to others when I am freshly mindful of the love that God has shown me. Also, the gospel gives me the wherewithal to give forgiving grace to those who have wronged me, for it reminds me daily of the forgiving grace that God is showing me.

Doing good and showing love to those who have wronged me is always the opposite of what my sinful flesh wants me to do. Nonetheless, when I remind myself of my sins against God and of His forgiveness and generous grace toward me, I give the gospel an opportunity to reshape my perspective and to put me in a frame of mind wherein I actually desire to give this same grace to those who have wronged me.”

- Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer for Christians

all are guilty and all are forgiven

“Jesus shocked the established authorities by being a friend to all—not only to the destitute and hungry, but also to those rich extortioners, the tax-collectors, whom all decent people ostracized … The shocking thing was not that he sided with the poor against the rich but that he met everyone equally with the same unlimited mercy and the same unconditioned demand for total loyalty.

If we look at the end of his earthly ministry, at the cross, it is clear that Jesus was rejected by all—rich and poor, rulers and people—alike. Before the cross of Jesus there are no innocent parties. The cross is not for some and against others. It is the place where all are guilty and all are forgiven.”

—Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
from: http://firstimportance.org/

The Devil's Condemnation vs. The Spirit's Conviction

When you belong to the King, how can you discern the difference between the Devil's condemnation and the Spirit's conviction? How can you determine if you are in the bogus courtroom or the real one?

In the real courtroom:

* you know your good deeds are not enough
* your hope is in Christ alone for your deliverance
* when convicted of sins, you are pointed past your sins and on to Christ
* the last word is always hope.

In the Devil's courtroom:

* the attention is all on your sins
* you stand and fall on your own behavior
* you are alone without an advocate
* questions are raised about the extent of God's forgiveness.

- Ed Welch
from Buzzard Blog

What is the church in a nutshell?

The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and sanctification center, where flawed people place their trust in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he has designed. The church is messy and inefficient, but it is God's wonderful mess -- the place where he radically transforms hearts and lives.

- Paul Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands

True Repentance

“Repentance has nothing to do with what man has done. Rather it is man’s coming undone in respect to all human righteousness, followed by his going outside himself in faith to Christ alone for salvation.”

- C. John Miller, Repentance and 21st Century Man

The Spirit and the Cross

“Truly to grasp that the eternal God, our Maker and Judge, has out of inexpressible grace sent his Son to die the odious death of an abominated criminal in order that we might be forgiven and reconciled to him; that this wise plan was effected by sinful leaders who thought they were controlling events and who were operating out of selfish expediency, while in fact God was bringing about his own good, redemptive purposes; that our only hope of life in the presence of this holy and loving God lies in casting ourselves without reserve on his mercy, receiving in faith the gift of forgiveness purchased at inestimable cost — none of this is possible apart from the work of the Spirit.”

- D. A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Baker Books, 2003), 66. originally posted by http://firstimportance.org/

What is "Evangelicalism"?

...quick question, long answer. D.A. Carson does a great job attempting to answer this huge and important question.

He addresses some of the issues involved with defining evangelicalism in the western world. LISTEN HERE

Donald A. Carson is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. Dr. Carson has written or edited more than 45 books, including The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Zondervan 1996), which won the 1997 Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Gold Medallion Award in the category "theology and doctrine." He coauthored An Introduction to the New Testament (Zondervan 1991) and other works.

know Jesus

by Charles Spurgeon
“Know Jesus. Sit as His feet. Consider His nature, HIs works, His sufferings, His glory. Rejoice in HIs presence; commune with Him day to day. To know Christ, is to understand the most excellent of all sciences. You cannot fail to be wise if you commune with Incarnate Wisdom; you cannot lack strength if you have constant fellowship with God.”

Eph 4:11-13 ESV
And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ

"Reformed and Evangelical" by R. Scott Clark

Clark makes a helpful comparison: "Perhaps it would be helpful to distinguish between being “evangelical” and being “an evangelical”? I am the former but not the latter.

"Reformed confessionalists are evangelical. We do long to see the true gospel preached truly to everyone and we do expect Christ to operate sovereignly and graciously through his gospel to call his elect from every tribe and tongue. We do long to see Christ’s church full. We long to see sinners coming to a knowledge of their sin and to a saving knowledge of Christ. We long to see those sinners growing in the grace of discipleship but, if I can presume to speak for confessionalists, we don’t have much confidence that contemporary evangelicalism is in any shape to do most of that." Read the whole thing

Responses to “Reformed and Evangelical” by Irons

Lee Irons elaborates and responds to critics of his first post:

"Sure, our differences on TULIP, the covenants, the sacraments, and so on, are important, but if you hold to the white-hot core of the gospel, then I embrace you as a brother in Christ and I want to be identified with whatever label will work to make sure that this embrace is clear. Of course, I will worship at my own Reformed church on Sunday and you will go to your dispensational Bible-church or Baptist church or what have you, but we can do so without either one adopting an attitude of superiority or exceptionalism since we recognize one another as brothers based on the common bond that we have in Christ. read the whole post here

"I consider myself to be a Christian first..."

Reformed and Evangelical
by Lee Irons

It’s good to see that there are still some Reformed people these days who embrace the label “evangelical” (see the posts by Stephen Nichols and Sean Lucas on the Ref21 site). I don’t sympathize with the Reformed trend that utterly scorns and detests the label. I have no desire to set myself apart as a “Reformed Confessionalist” who has nothing in common with evangelicalism. This separatist attitude is wrong for several reasons:

(1) It smacks of spiritual pride and elitism. I consider myself to be a Christian first, then a Protestant, then an evangelical, and only then Reformed. To exalt ”Reformed” über alles is to downplay our central identity as Christians. To exalt the Reformed confessions is to downplay the primary New Testament confession that “Jesus is Lord.” I’m not a Reformed person who happens to be a Christian. I’m a blood-bought Christian who happens to believe in the Reformed understanding of the gospel. And I do not view myself as a superior Christian for having this belief. It is only by the grace of God that I understand what I do of the grace of God, and even then I betray it all too often in my practice.
read the whole thing

the way God gives faith

"In this way, therefore, faith is a gift of God, not in the sense that it is offered by God for man to choose, but that it is in actual fact bestowed on man, breathed and infused into him. Nor is it a gift in the sense that God bestows only the potential to believe, but then awaits assent — the act of believing — from man’s choice; rather, it is a gift in the sense that he who works both willing and acting and, indeed, works all things in all people produces in man both the will to believe and the belief itself."

- Canons of Dordt, article 14

Not only does this quote from the Canons distinguish historic Calvinism from Arminianism, but biblical Christianity from all other religions, i.e Rome, Mormonism, the Jehova's Witnesses, etc...

the love and life of Christ

"The love of Christ for us is to be held forth as the great constraining motive to religion, and the life of Christ as the bright, engaging pattern of it."

- Thomas Foxcroft, The Gospel Ministry

muppet gangstaaaaaz

And if you think these guys aren’t the Original Original Gangstaz, then you never saw what happened to people who dissed Wilkins Coffee.



I spied these on The RiffTrax Blog by Bill Corbett and had to post them myself.

the only people who get better

“The only people who get better are people who know that, if they never get better, God will love them anyway.”

—Steve Brown, A Scandalous Freedom (West Monroe, LA: Howard Books, 2004), 68-69

all they need is their need

Commenting on Romans 4:5 John H. Gerstner writes:

"If men will only be convinced that they have no righteousness that is not like filthy rags; if men will see that there is no one who does good, not even one; if men will see that they are all shut up under sin--then there will be nothing to prevent their everlasting salvation. All they need is their need. All they must have is nothing. All that is required is acknowledgment of guilt. Just confess your sins and repent of them.

But, alas, sinners cannot part with their so-called "virtues." They have none that are not imaginary, but they are very real to them. So grace becomes unreal. The real grace of God they spurn in order to hold on to their own illusory virtues. Their eyes are fixed on a mirage, so they will not drink real water. They die of thirst with water all around them."

Romans 4:5 "But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness."

sinclair ferguson on indicatives

I ran across this great quote over at Miscellanies : “The great gospel imperatives to holiness are ever rooted in indicatives of grace that are able to sustain the weight of those imperatives. The Apostles do not make the mistake that’s often made in Christian ministry. [For the Apostles] the indicatives are more powerful than the imperatives in gospel preaching. So often in our preaching our indicatives are not strong enough, great enough, holy enough, or gracious enough to sustain the power of the imperatives. And so our teaching on holiness becomes a whip or a rod to beat our people’s backs because we’ve looked at the New Testament and that’s all we ourselves have seen. We’ve seen our own failure and we’ve seen the imperatives to holiness and we’ve lost sight of the great indicatives of the gospel that sustain those imperatives. … Woven into the warp and woof of the New Testament’s exposition of what it means for us to be holy is the great groundwork that the self-existent, thrice holy, triune God has — in Himself, by Himself and for Himself — committed Himself and all three Persons of His being to bringing about the holiness of His own people. This is the Father’s purpose, the Son’s purchase and the Spirit’s ministry.”

- Sinclair Ferguson, message from the 2007 Banner of Truth Conference, Our Holiness: The Father’s Purpose and the Son’s Purchase.