Quote for Today

"Grace is not permission to sin without limits, but permission to pursue God without limits in spite of our sin."

This was a key statement in a sermon I preached last Sunday. The sermon was about Romans 1:16-17 and about how the good news about Jesus is the reason for, the motivation for, and the substance of our message to the world. I ended the sermon with a call for Christians to understand their identity in Christ: they are children of God, not employees of God. The difference is remarkable: people who think they have to be a perfect parent/spouse/friend/etc. in order for God to love them are thinking like employees. They think that performance earns God's love. But that thinking misunderstands grace. Grace has multiple sides to it: on the one hand, grace is God withholding from us what we deserve while giving us what we don't deserve, and on the other hand, grace is margin for error in our lives as Christians. God loves us not because we've earned it, not because we're perfect, but because we are his children.

Quote for Today

"Now faith will totter if the authority of Scripture begins to shake. And then, if faith totter, love itself will grow cold. For if a man has fallen from faith, he must necessarily also fall from love; for he cannot love what he does not believe to exist."

- Augustine, On Christian Instruction, book 1, ch. 35

Quote for Today

"All glory and growth were given to you, and then that which is written was fulfilled: 'My beloved ate and drank and was enlarged and grew fat and kicked,' From this came jealousy and envy, strife and sedition, persecution and anarchy, war and captivity. So people were stirred up: those without honor against the honored, those of no repute against the highly reputed, the foolish against the wise, the young against the old. For this reason righteousness and peace stand at a distance, while each one has abandoned the fear of God and become nearly blind with respect to faith in him, neither walking according to the laws of his commandments nor living in accordance with his duty toward Christ. Instead, all follow the lusts of their evil heart, inasmuch as they have assumed that attitude of unrighteous and ungodly jealousy through which, in fact, death entered into the world."
- 1 Clement 3:1-4

What a stunning indictment against the first-century church of Corinth, to which Clement writes from the church of Rome. The letters of Clement are not in the Bible, but they are real and historical and written to address real problems in the Corinthian church. In some ways, what Clement said of the church in Corinth is true of the church in America (and not just the part about being fat). Some questions for American Christians to ponder:

• Have we become so self-sufficient (through wealth, success, peace, etc.) that we are "nearly blind with respect to faith in [God]"?
• Are you jealous of other Christians' (or other churches') success?
• Do we even know these days what it means to fear God?
• We talk at great length about how we dislike so much of the culture around us. Why is it true, then, as Philip Yancey says, that "all too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way"?

Not every church or Christian is this way. But many of us are truly unaware of how much our culture has negatively shaped American Christianity. This is one area to which I have been giving some thought lately, partly because I am teaching a lesson on this very subject later this year, and partly because I just sense the problem through my experiences and my own life. I don't have many answers yet, but this is as good a place as any to begin thinking out loud on it.

For my Christian readers, your input is greatly appreciated. In what ways is American Christianity negatively affected by culture? Examples would be great.

For my non-Christian readers, just know that not every Christian blindly accepts what their preachers tell them; many sense that things could be better/kinder/more welcoming/less hateful for folks like you who would love to go to church if it weren't for the people inside.

Another Quote for Today

“God’s highest purpose of creation is achieved when his rational creatures are seeking above all else to please him.”

Jack Cottrell, God the Creator, 128

Quote for Today

"Millions all around us are living the tragedy of meaningless life, the 'life' of spiritual death. That is what makes our society most radically different from every society in history: not that it can fly to the moon, enfranchise more voters, have the grossest national product, conquer disease, or even blow up the entire planet, but that it does not know why it exists."

Peter Kreeft, Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing, p. 12

A Good Quote

I feel that my job, my calling, is to help the church understand who they are, who God is, and the difference he makes in their lives. While thinking about this calling, I wonder what I can do to accomplish this three-part task. One of these days, I am going to write a book explaining each part of that calling, which, put another way, explains the doctrine of man, the doctrine of God, and the doctrine of the church/Christian living.

With the who-knows-when-book in the back of my mind, I read books and articles with an eye toward finding quotes that explain what I want to say better than I can say it. Here is one example; it is C.S. Lewis describing the new life Christians have in Christ:

A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble- because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

(From Mere Christianity, p. 64)

Some Random Quotes I Like

“in the final analysis, forgiveness is an act of faith. By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am. By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out. I leave in God’s hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.”

- Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing about Grace?, p. 93

"God's love is an action toward us, not a reaction to us. His love depends not on what we are but on what He is. He loves because He is love."

- David Seamands, Healing Grace, p. 115