R.C. Sproul: One word that crystallizes the essence of the Christian faith is the word grace. One of the great mottos of the Protestant Reformation was the Latin phrase sola gratia—by grace alone. This phrase wasn’t invented by the sixteenth-century Reformers. Its roots are in the theology of Augustine of Hippo, who used it to call attention to the central concept of Christianity, that our redemption is by grace alone, that the only way a human being can ever find himself reconciled to God is by grace. That concept is so central to the teaching of Scripture that to even mention it seems like an insult to people’s intelligence; yet, if there is a dimension of Christian theology that has become obscured in the last few generations, it is grace. Two things that every human being absolutely must come to understand are the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man. These topics are difficult for people to face. And they go
Man in Sin
The Hollowing Effect of Sin
Tim Keller on the banality of evil: Evil does not usually make people incredibly wicked and violent – that would be interesting, and tends to wake people up. Rather, sin tends to make us hollow – externally proper and even nice, but underneath everyone is scraping and clutching for power, in order to get ahead. We continually just step on each other… C. S. Lewis called these folk “men without chests” in The Abolition of Man. They may have reason (represented by the head) or visceral feelings and drives (represented by the gut), but they don’t have hearts. They are not really choosing, but rather are being driven by their desires for power and gain, by their fears and anger. We are all in danger of being just as banal and hollow and uninteresting, if we insist on making God “tame” and banal! Only by worshiping the real God can we escape this boring fate and know the blessing of
The 200 Million “Missing” Girls
Justin Taylor: A new documentary, It’s a Girl! The Three Deadliest Words in the World, explores the systematic gendercide taking place in India, China, and other areas of South Asia. Ram Mushru, reviewing the film the Independent, writes: “The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.” That line makes me think of Romans 1:32: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things [like heartless, ruthless murder—see vv. 29-31] deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” You can watch it here: . UPDATE: This response was posted to my comments page: Beginning of December, a program aired on ABC 20/20 about India’s deadly secret. It was about 40 million girls who have vanished. All aborted before they could take their first breath. Their crime was that they were girls. As you know the gender ratios
The Prodigal
You can download the song here. (HT: Tony Reinke)
Monergistic Regeneration
From John Hendryx: Since faith is infinitely beyond all the power of our unregenerated human nature, it is only God who can give the spiritual ears to hear and eyes to see the beauty of Christ in the gospel. God alone disarms the hostility of the sinner turning his heart of stone to a heart of flesh. It is God, the Holy Spirit, alone who gives illumination and understanding of His word that we might believe; It is God who raises us from the death of sin, who circumcises the heart; unplugs our ears; It is God alone who can give us a new sense, a spiritual capacity to behold the beauty and unsurpassed excellency of Jesus Christ. The apostle John recorded Jesus saying to Nicodemus that we naturally love darkness, hate the light and WILL NOT come into the light (John 3:19, 20). And since our hardened resistance to God is thus seated in our affections, only God, by
That’s Why
“Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’ Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1983 (HT: Ray Ortlund)
John Stott: Is Man Basically Good?
“Much that we take for granted in a civilized society is based upon the assumption of human sin. Nearly all legislation has grown up because human beings cannot be trusted to settle their own disputes with justice and without self-interest. A promise is not enough; we need a contract. Doors are not enough; we have to lock and bolt them. The payment of fares is not enough; tickets have to be issued, inspected and collected. Law and order are not enough; we need the police to enforce them. All this is due to man’s sin. We cannot trust each other. We need protection against one another. It is a terrible indictment of human nature.” – John Stott, Basic Christianity (HT: Josh Harris)
Without the New Birth…
Without the new birth, we won’t have saving faith, but only unbelief. (John 1:11-13; 1 John 5:1; Ephesians 2:8-9; Philippians 1:29; 1 Timothy 1:14; 2 Timothy 1:3). Without the new birth, we won’t have justification, but only condemnation. (Romans 8:1; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 2:17 Philippians 3:9). Without the new birth, we won’t be the children of God, but the children of the devil. (1 John 3:9-10). Without the new birth, we won’t bear the fruit of love by the Holy Spirit, but only bear the fruit of death. (Romans 6:20-21; 7:4-6; 15:16; 1 Corinthians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Ephesians 2:10; Galatians 5:6; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; 1 Peter 1:2; 1 John 3:14). Without the new birth, we won’t have eternal joy in fellowship with God, but only eternal misery with the devil and his angels. (Matthew 25:41; John 3:3; Romans 6:23; Revelation 2:11; 20:15). — John Piper, Why Do We Need to Be Born Again? (Part 2) (HT: Adrian Warnock)
One Point Calvinism!
By Pastor Scott Thomas, Acts 29 Director As a church planter, I received more arguments over our position of Reformed Theology than I did everything else combined. It angered the most faithful of Christians and confused others. Only a handful, I believed, truly understood the doctrine of salvation as described in the Bible. It was a point of contention that got people off mission–even though it was not presented in a polarizing manner. JI Packer, above, at a hotel room in Orlando talking to us about his desire to leave a lasting legacy. Recently I read The Five Points of Calvinism co-authored by David Steele, Curtis Thomas and Lance Quinn (P&R Publishing). I felt it was a shepherdly treatise on the doctrines of grace that can help the layman to understanding the centrality of God in the salvation of man. The book quotes JI Packer, whom I had the pleasure of spending the day with recently. I think his explanation
Focused on Christ & His Cross
“Focus on Christ will always result in focus on the cross. You cannot be Christ-centered without becoming cross-centered. The crucified Christ is to be the center of everything I know about myself and my world. You cannot have any real hope for flawed people in a fallen world unless there is a Redeemer to rescue us from the evil that resides both inside and outside of us. Real restoration to God’s created design requires the cross. It is the cross of Christ that alone will restore my allegiance to Christ and his rightful place at the center of everything in my life.” – Paul David Tripp, A Quest for More (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2007), 104. (HT: Of First Importance)
The need for conviction of sin
“The plain truth is that a right understanding of sin lies at the root of all saving Christianity. Without it such doctrines as justification, conversion, sanctification, are “words and names” which convey no meaning to the mind. The first thing, therefore, that God does when He makes anyone a new creature in Christ is to send light into his heart and show him that he is a guilty sinner. The material creation in Genesis began with “light,” and so also does the spiritual creation. God “shines into our hearts” by the work of the Holy Spirit and then spiritual life begins (2 Cor. 4:6). Dim or indistinct views of sin are the origin of most of the errors, heresies and false doctrines of the present day. If a man does not realize the dangerous nature of his soul’s disease, you cannot wonder if he is content with false or imperfect remedies. I believe that one of the chief wants of
Quietness vs. entertainment
“People today are afraid to be alone. This fear is a dominant mark of our society. Many now ceaselessly sit in the cinema or read novels about other people’s lives or watch dramas. Why? Simply to avoid having to face their own existence. . . . No one seems to want (and no one can find) a place of quiet — because, when you are quiet, you have to face reality. But many in the present generation dare not do this because on their own basis reality leads them to meaninglessness; so they fill their lives with entertainment, even if it is only noise. . . . The Christian is supposed to be very opposite: There is a place for proper entertainment, but we are not to be caught up in ceaseless motion which prevents us from ever being quiet. Rather we are to put everything second so we can be alive to the voice of God and allow it
The glory of the cross
The glory of the cross The great crescendo of the gospel By James Philip, for Evangelicals Now. We may not feel guilty, but the Scriptures speak of our guilt before God as an objective reality (Romans 3.19,20). Some people have less sensitive consciences than others, but how we feel does not change how God sees us. Guilt is an objective reality and justification, which deals with it, is also objective. It is something God does; it is a declaration God makes about us. It is, as the 17th-century Shorter Catechism of the Church of Scotland says, ‘an act of God’s free grace, in which he, the Judge of all the earth, acquits the guilty sinner, and declares him to be righteous, and accepts him as righteous in his sight’. Justification and sacrifice The Greek word translated ‘justify’ (dikaioun) means ‘to count, or treat, as righteous’, not to make righteous in any ethical sense. Justification is not something that is done
Man’s Natural Bent
“People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith and delight in the Lord. We drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated. -D.A. Carson (HT: Reformed Voices)
Already Not Yet 