Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ's accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his victory, not yours.
Only when you realize that the gospel has nothing to do with your obedience but with Christ's obedience for you, will you start to obey. The only Christians who end up getting better are those who realize that if they don't get better, God will love them anyway.
To focus on how I'm doing more than what Christ has done is Christian narcissism
Real, pure, unadulterated freedom happens when the resources of the gospel smash any sense of need to secure for myself anything beyond what Christ has already secured for me.
Christian growth doesn't happen by first behaving better, but by believing better--believi ng in bigger, deeper, brighter ways what Christ has already secured for sinners.
Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.
In those moments when I'm obsessively counting my sins against me, it is good news to remember that God has counted my sins against Christ.
The gospel is not about a lifestyle that we live, it's about the law-fulfilling life that Christ lived.
Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make good people good; it makes dead people alive. That's the difference between the gospel of Jesus Christ and every other world religion. All the others exhort their followers to save themselves by being good, by conforming their lives to whatever their worshiped deity is. But the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.
Only when we see that the way of God's law is absolutely inflexible will we see that God's grace is absolutely indispensable. A high view of the law reminds us that God accepts us on the basis of Christ's perfection, not our progress. Grace, properly understood, is the movement of a holy God toward an unholy people. He doesn't cheapen the law or ease its requirements. He fulfills them in his Son, who then gives his righteousness to us. That's the gospel. Pure and simple.
If you uproot the idol and fail to plant the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.
When the Christian faith becomes defined by who we are and what we do and not by who Christ is and what he did for us, we miss the gospel - and we, ironically, become more disobedient.
Submitting self to God is the only real freedom-because the deepest slavery is self-dependence, self-reliance. When you live your life believing that everything (family, finances, relationships, career) depends primarily on you, you're enslaved to your strengths and weaknesses. You're trying to be your own savior. Freedom comes when we start trusting in God's abilities and wisdom instead of our own. Real life begins when we transfer our trust from our own efforts to the efforts of Christ.
When we imply that our works are for God and not our neighbor, we perpetuate the idea that God's love for us is dependent on what we do instead of on what Christ has done.
Assurance never comes from looking at ourselves. It only comes as a consequence of looking to Christ.
The Gospel announces that Jesus came to acquit the guilty. He came to judge and be judged in our place. Christ came to satisfy the deep judgment against us once and for all so that we could be free from the judgement of God, others, and ourselves.
Death is the operative device that sets us free in Christ - when we die, we truly live.
God reminds us again and again that things between He and us are forever fixed. They are the rendezvous points where God declares to us concretely that the debt has been paid, the ledger put away, and that everything we need, in Christ we already possess. This re-convincing produces humility, because we realize that our needs are fulfilled. We don’t have to worry about ourselves anymore. This in turn frees us to stop looking out for what we think we need and liberates us to love our neighbor by looking out for what they need.
I never had an intellectual struggle with the Bible, with the gospel, with the claims of Christ.
Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make bad people good; it makes dead people alive...the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.
The only thing that frees you from the need to pretend in order to make people believe you are something when you are actually not is the gospel because the gospel tells you that identity, my meaning, my security, and all of those things are in Christ.
Sanctification consists of the daily realization that in Christ we have died, and in Christ we have been raised.
You see, the secret of the gospel is that we become more spiritually mature when we focus less on what we need to do for God and focus more on all that God has already done for us. The irony of the gospel is that we actually perform better as we grow in our understanding that our relationship with God is based on Christ's performance for us, not our performance for him.
My job is not to show my children that I'm the man, but to show them that Christ is the man.
To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible's radically disproportionate focus on God's saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ.
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