IsaiahC

A hymn for Lord's Day 11 Oct 2009.

It is interesting that the biblical writers chose the word “gospel.” The heart of most religions is good advice, good techniques, good programs, good ideas, and good support systems. These drive us deeper into ourselves, to find our inner light, inner goodness, inner voice, or inner resources. Nothing new can be found inside of us. There is no inner rescuer deep down in my soul; I just hear echoes of my own voice telling me all sorts of crazy things to numb my sense of fear, anxiety, and boredom, the origins of which I cannot truly identify. But the heart of Christianity is Good News. It comes not as a task for us to fulfill, a mission for us to accomplish, a game plan for us to follow with the help of life coaches, but as a report that someone else has already fulfilled, accomplished, followed, and achieved everything for us. Good advice may help us in daily direction; the Good News concerning Jesus Christ saves us from sin’s guilt and tyranny over our lives and the fear of death. It’s Good News because it does not depend on us. It is about God and his faithfulness to his own purposes and promises.

The average person thinks that the purpose of religion is to give us a list of rules and techniques or to frame a way of life that helps us to be more loving, forgiving, patient, caring, and generous. Of course, there is plenty of this in the Bible. Like Moses, Jesus summarized the whole law in just those terms: loving God and neighbor. However, as crucial as the law remains as the revelation of God’s moral will, it is different from the revelation of God’s saving will. We are called to love God and neighbor, but that is not the gospel. Christ need not have died on a cross for us to know that we should be better people. It is not that moral exhortations are wrong, but they do not have any power to bring about the kind of world that they command. These exhortations and directions may be good. If they come from the Word of God, they are in fact perfect. But they are not the gospel.

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As true as a lot of the exhortations might be, the familiarity of law (things to do) can make us wonder why the message of our churches is all that different and why the Christian message is all that radical. Only the radical news concerning Jesus Christ can distract us from all the trivial pursuits and transform us from the inside out. Only the gospel can cause such a radical reevaluation of our core identity that we’re willing, like Paul, to throw away what we thought was a great resume in exchange for being found in Christ. In fact, once the gospel reconfigures our whole take on reality, it even opens us up to God’s law again as the concrete expression of God’s moral will for our relationship to him and to each other. No longer condemning us, it guides us. Thus, even the law itself is given its due when we strip it of our cleverly devised additions and no longer rely on our own obedience. Trusting in Christ as he is clothed in his gospel, we are guided by the law without any fear of our failures provoking its judgment. Religious programs and outreach strategies might create social centers defined by niche demographics, but the gospel creates a genuine “cross-cultural” community that gathers the generations, races, rich and poor around Christ and his feast of grace.

It is Christ Himself then who established for His church the pattern and end of all theologizing -- the pattern: we must make the exposition of Scripture the basis of our theology; the end: we must arrive finally at Him in all our theological labors.

Reymond, Robert L. A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith. Second ed. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998. Print.

Let us ever glory in the cross of Christ; let us regard it as the source of all our hopes, and the foundation of all our peace. Ignorance and unbelief may see nothing in the sufferings of Calvary but the cruel martyrdom of an innocent person: faith will look far deeper; faith will see in the death of Jesus the payment of man’s enormous debt to God, and the complete salvation of all who believe.

-- J.C. Ryle

HT: J.C. Ryle Quotes

Christians, be troublesome to the world! O house of Israel, be like a burdensome stone to the world! You are not sent here to be recognized as honorable citizens of this world, to be petted and well-treated.

Even Christ himself, the peaceable One, said, "I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?"

What I mean is this, we are not to be quiet about our religion. The world says to us, "Hold your tongue about religion, or at least talk about it at fit times; but do not introduce it at all seasons so as to become a pest and a nuisance."

I say again, and you know in what sense I mean it, be a nuisance to the world; be such a man that worldlings will be compelled to feel that there is a Christian in their midst.

An officer was walking out of the royal presence on one occasion, when he tripped over his sword. The king said to him, "Your sword is rather a nuisance." "Yes," was the officer's reply, "your majesty's enemies have often said so."

May you be a nuisance to the world in that sense, troublesome to the enemies of the King of kings! While your conduct should be courteous, and everything that could be desired as between man and man, yet let your testimony for Christ be given without any flinching and without any mincing of the matter.

-- Charles Spurgeon

HT: Pyromaniacs

I am Reformed because of one thing: Consistently, honestly, and thoroughly read, God’s Word, the Bible, teaches that God is sovereign over all things, that man is a fallen creature, and that God saves perfectly in Jesus Christ. It is the consistent application of sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) and tota Scriptura (all of Scripture) that leads inevitably to the doctrines of grace.

-- James White