John Piper: 1. Do you love the thought that you exist to make God look what he really is — glorious? Do you love the thought that you exist to reflect and display the glory of God? Does that bring joy to your heart and make you tingle with awesome historical destiny? I am on planet earth to make God look glorious, because he is. 2. Do you love the thought that all creation exists to display the glory of God? “The heavens are telling the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). Are you glad about it? When you see spring just trying to come in Minnesota — soon the branches will get little bulges and you’ll say, “Come on; come on.” When they come in, the heads that you chop back so far, you wonder if it’ll ever come back, it gets the little green things on it and you say, “God is real and living.” Are you glad that it’s about
salvation
Two ways to know you are saved
J.D. Greear: I get the question from Christians a lot: “How can I know for sure that I’m saved?” So often, in fact, that I wrote a book addressing it: Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart. I struggled with the question a lot myself until someone pointed me to passage from 1 John that helped open my eyes. In 1 John 5:13–18, John identifies 2 ways that we can be sure of our salvation. 1. We have placed our hopes for heaven entirely on Jesus. (1 John 5:13) “I write these things to you,” John says, “who believe in the name of the Son of God.” It’s so simple that we’re liable to miss it, but assurance comes from believing in Jesus. This is the gospel: when we trust in his name, we cease striving to earn heaven by drawing upon our own moral bank account; instead, we withdraw on his righteous account in our place. The gospel, by its very nature, produces assurance. Because
The Rescuing Love of God
This post by Mike Bullmore is adapted from the ESV Men’s Devotional Bible. A Dire Situation Apart from God, man gets himself into all sorts of spiritually dangerous and eternity-threatening situations. Four such situations are described in Psalm 107. We might not immediately find ourselves relating to what we see here, but if we read carefully and with spiritually attuned eyes, we will find much that maps onto our lives. In each of four successive vignettes the psalmist describes some dire situation (Ps. 107:4, 10, 17, 23). Then, in each one of those scenes, two refrains are repeated exactly word for word: first, “Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress” (vv. 6, 13, 19, 28); second, after an account of God’s deliverance, “Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man” (vv. 8, 15, 21, 31). This repeated pattern of distress and
Deeper into the gospel
Our great need is to be led further in to what we already have. The gospel is so deep that it not only meets our deepest needs but comes from God’s deepest self. The salvation proclaimed in the gospel is not some mechanical operation that God took on as a side project. It is a ‘mystery that was kept secret for long ages’ (Rom. 16:25), a mystery of salvation that goes back into the heart of God, decreed ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:20). When God undertook our salvation, he did it in a way that put divine resources into play, resources which involve him personally in the task.… The deeper we dig into the gospel, the deeper we go into the mystery of the Trinity. — Fred Sanders The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (HT: Of First Importance)
Union with Christ – the taproot of our entire salvation
J.I. Packer: “But the taproot of our entire salvation, and the true NT frame for cataloguing its ingredients, is our union with Christ himself by the Holy Spirit. That is, to be more precise, our implantation, symbolized by the under-and-up-from-under of water baptism, into the twin realities of Christ’s own dying and rising (see Rom 6:1-11; Col 2:9-12). In this union we have a salvation that is not only positional through the cross in the terms just stated, and relational through our sustained faith-communion with our Lord, but is also transformational through the regenerating and indwelling Spirit, who stirs and motivates and empowers us to express our new hearts’ desires in new habits of action and reaction constituting Christlike character (‘the fruit of the Spirit’ in Gal 5:22-23). ”Atonement in the Life of the Christian,” in The Glory of the Atonement, 417 (HT: Sam Storms)
Already Not Yet 