A Declaration by God
“Justification goes beyond forgiveness. Not only are we forgiven because of Christ, but God also declares us righteous because of Christ. God requires two things of us: punishment for our sins and perfection in our lives. Our sins must be punished, and our lives must be righteous. But we cannot bear our own punishment (Ps. 49:7-8), and we cannot provide our own righteousness. “None is righteous; no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). Therefore, God, out of His immeasurable love for us, provided His own Son to do both. Christ bears our punishment, and Christ performs our righteousness. And when we receive Christ (John 1:12), all of His punishment and all of His righteousness is counted as ours (Rom. 4:4-6; 5:1, 19; 8:1; 10:4; 2 Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:8-9).”
John Piper
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The Grace of God is Proclaimed in the Gospel
“The grace of God is proclaimed in the Gospel (Acts 20:24), which is to the self-righteous Jew a ‘stumbling block,’ and to the conceited and philosophizing Greek ‘foolishness.’ And why so? Because there is nothing whatever in it that is adapted to the gratifying of the pride of man. It announces that unless we are saved by grace, we cannot be saved at all. It declares that apart from Christ, the unspeakable Gift of God’s grace, the state of every man is desperate, irremediable, hopeless. The Gospel addresses men as guilty, condemned, perishing criminals. It declares that the chastest moralist is in the same terrible plight as is the most voluptuous profligate; and the zealous professor, with all his religious performances, is no better off than the most profane infidel.
The Gospel contemplates every descendant of Adam as a fallen, polluted, hell-deserving and helpless sinner. The grace which the Gospel publishes is his only hope. All stand before God convicted as transgressors of His holy law, as guilty and condemned criminals, who are not merely awaiting sentence, but the execution of the sentence already passed upon them (John 3:18; Rom 3:19). To complain against the partiality of grace is suicidal. If the sinner insists upon bare justice, then the Lake of Fire must be his eternal portion. His only hope lies in bowing to the sentence which divine justice has passed upon him, owning the absolute righteousness of it, casting himself on the mercy of God, and stretching forth empty hands to avail himself of the grace of God now made known to him in the Gospel.
The third Person in the Godhead is the Communicator of grace, therefore is He denominated ‘the Spirit of grace’ (Zech 12:10). God the Father is the Fountain of all grace, for He purposed in Himself the everlasting covenant of redemption. God the Son is the only Channel of grace. The Gospel is the Publisher of grace. The Spirit is the Bestower. He is the One who applies the Gospel in saving power to the soul: quickening the elect while spiritually dead, conquering their rebellious wills, melting their hard hearts, opening their blind eyes, cleansing them from the leprosy of sin.”
A.W.Pink
The Darkest Hour of Trial
He who spared not His own Son but freely gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” Romans 8:32
“If God has given His Son to die for us, let us beware of doubting His kindness and love in any painful providence of our daily life. Let us never allow ourselves to think hard thoughts of God or suppose that He can give us anything that is not really for our good.
Let us see, in every sorrow and trouble of our earthly pilgrimage, the hand of Him who gave Christ to die for our sins. That hand can never smite us except in love! He who gave His Son to die for our sins will never withhold anything from us that is really for our good. Let us lean back on this thought and say to ourselves in the darkest hour of trial, ‘This also is ordered by Him who gave Christ to die for my sins. It cannot be wrong! It is done in love! It must be well’.”
J.C.Ryle
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The Cure for Narcissism
“The cure for the thirst for independence and self-erected glory is the cross. “The cross does the extinguishing. We must come to confess that we are addicted to sin, addicted to self, whatever form that may take, pious or impious. The cross is the death of sin, and the sinner.” Why? because the cross tells us the truth about ourselves. We’ve got nothing to offer but demerit. But believer, you are loved. Because you are loved, you’ll be kept and changed and glorified. Because you’ve been loved, you’ve been effectually called, given faith, granted a heart of repentance, justified, adopted and sanctified. He speaks as though our glorification has already happened. We’re in union with Christ.”
Luther
Jesus the Altar of Your Atonement
“The proud heart of man is very anxious to have a hand in the justification of the soul before God; preparations for Christ are dreamed of, humblings and repentings are trusted in, good works are cried up, natural ability is much vaunted, and by all means the attempt is made to lift up human tools upon the divine altar. It were well if sinners would remember that so far from perfecting the Savior’s work, their carnal confidences only pollute and dishonor it. The Lord alone must be exalted in the work of atonement, and not a single mark of man’s chisel or hammer will be endured.
There is an inherent blasphemy in seeking to add to what Christ Jesus in His dying moments declared to be finished, or to improve that in which the Lord Jehovah finds perfect satisfaction. Trembling sinner, away with your tools. Fall on your knees in humble supplication. Accept the Lord Jesus to be the altar of your atonement, and rest in Him alone.”
- Charles Spurgeon
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Grace Reigns Through Righteousness
Men think that they are to be saved by keeping God’s commandments. They are to do their best, and they conceive that their sincere endeavors will be accepted, and they will thus save themselves. This self-righteous idea is diametrically opposed to the whole spirit of the gospel. The gospel is not for you who can save yourselves, but for those who are lost. If you can save yourselves, go and do it, and do not mock the Savior with your hypocritical prayers. Go and stumble among the tombs of ancient Israel, and perish as they did in the wilderness, for into rest Moses and the law can never lead you.
The gospel is for sinners who cannot keep the law for themselves, who have broken it, and incurred its penalty, who know that they have done so, and confess it. For such, a living Savior has come that he may blot out their transgressions. Seek not salvation by the works of the law, for by them shall no flesh living be justified. By the law is the knowledge of sin, and nothing more, but righteousness, peace, life, salvation, come by faith in the living Lord Jesus Christ, and by no other means. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved;” but if you go about to establish your own righteousness, you shall surely perish, because you have rejected the righteousness of Christ.
Spurgeon
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Grace Partners
Partnering in grace with our children means that we are together learning to rely on the Holy Spirit. Telling our children that we, too, are struggling to understand how the gospel can change us and admitting we really don’t see how it does right now will teach them that faith doesn’t mean that we have certainty or clarity all the time. Sometimes we will simply need to manage them while we wait for light. At times like this we can honestly tell them that we are trying to see what the gospel looks like and that we are walking in shadow.
This place of transparency and brokenness before our children and the Lord will ultimately be a place of freedom and grace, even though at first it will feel like a place of despair and humiliation. When we really understand that there is nothing we can say or do that will change our children’s hearts, at that moment we’re in the place of humility that is the only door to promised grace.
Although God has promised to resist parents who proudly assume they can save the day by their own efforts, he has also promised to give grace to those who humbly bow before him, casting all their cares on him and confession of our great need, will result in the grace we so desperately need to parent the little fellow sinners in our home.
We need days of failure because they humble us, and through them we can see how God’s grace is poured out on the humble. It is on days like this that the words,” The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ” (1 Peter 5:10), will bring deep comfort and great joy to your soul.
Elyse Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace
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Growing In Grace
The more time we spend pondering what Jesus has already done for us, the more we will grow in comprehending grace, that we have been highly favored by what Jesus has done. This understanding will eventually transform how we parent our children. We will favor them with our love and attention because we will see how we have been so abundantly favored. We will be conscious of our sin when we see theirs, and we will stop trying to preserve our great reputation as parents. We will be patient because he has been so patient with us. We really love because we’ve been really loved. This understanding of the foundation of grace will slowly transform our expectations, hopes, and desires for ourselves and our children. Grace changes everything about us- even when we forget it.
Grace transforms our parenting because it takes our sin immense in our eyes by showing us the hideousness of the bloody cross that was necessary before God could favor us with forgiveness. Every sin we’ve committed as parents was placed upon him there. Grace makes mercy huge because it reveals the price he had to pay to bestow that grace on us. We deserved judgement; we’ve been given mercy! It magnifies God’s great mercies because we see the unimaginable suffering of the Son who fulfilled all righteousness (Matt.3:15) and was forsaken (Matt. 27:46). Grace magnifies Jesus Christ and shows us our weakness and dependency.
So, when you have that morning to top all mornings, when everything that could possibly go wrong does, when grace doesn’t mean anything to you, it is his grace that will sustain you. What mornings like these teach us is that we’re just like our children. They forget, and so do we. They need grace, and so do we. We are partners in grace with them.
Elyse Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace
Understanding the Gospel
”Grace-driven effort is violent. It is aggressive. The person who understands the gospel understands that, as a new creation, his spiritual nature is in opposition to sin now, and he seeks not just to weaken sin in his life but to outright destroy it. Out of love for Jesus, he wants sin starved to death, and he will hunt and pursue the death of every sin in his heart until he has achieved success.
This is a very different pursuit than simply wanting to be good. It is the result of having transferred one’s affections to Jesus. When God’s love takes hold of us, it powerfully pushes out our own love for other gods and frees our love to flow back to him in true worship. And when we love God, we obey him. The moralist doesn’t operate that way. While true obedience is a result of love, moralistic legalism assumes it works the other way around, that love results from obedience.”
Matt Chandler,The Explicit Gospel
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Parenting In Grace
Grace is demonstrated in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ accomplished for you. It is all that he was, is, and ever will be. He loved perfectly in your place. He obeyed consistently. He always remembered. He ever lives now as your faithful brother and High Priest, interceding for you. Jesus Christ himself is God’s grace to you. He is the door that opens up access to your loving Father’s heart. Grace is what he has given to you: it is that oh-so-costly unmerited favor. And with that favor comes his strength to enable you to preserve through every trial of parenting. Grace is not a novel, failsafe catchphrase that will ensure successful parenting. No, it’s something so much better than that! It is God’s assured favor toward undeserving rebels whom, in his inscrutable love, he has decided to bless.
When he looks with favor upon us as beloved children, he also supplies the strength we need to persevere through every trials of life, whether or not we remember his grace. Grace isn’t created by our ability to work at it or even remember it- that’s why it’s called “grace.” Paul makes this point abundantly clear when writing to the Romans about his saved Jewish kinsmen who were “chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace” (Romans 11:5-6). Parenting in grace is not parenting on the basis of your own consistent gospel- centeredness. It is just the opposite. Parenting in grace is parenting on the basis of Christ’s consistent perfections alone.
Elyse Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace
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New Translations, Free for the World
Here is an update from Desiring God on translations they have been adding to their website. As always, you can visit their language index to see all the resources they have in any particular language.
Oh, and don’t forget the translated versions of the website (they added Persian just this week!). You can access all eight of them by mousing over the “International” button at the top right of their website.
Here’s just a sampling of what they posted recently:
- Albanian sermons, like Triumfi i Ungjillit në Qiellin e ri dhe Tokën e re (“The Triumph of the Gospel in the New Heavens and the New Earth”)
- Arabic sermons, including لنذهب مع يسوع، حاملين عاره (“Let Us Go with Jesus Bearing Reproach”)
- Chinese sermons, such as 为什么耶稣被处死而且又复活了？ (“Why Was Jesus Put to Death and Raised Again?”)
- Czech sermons, like Buďte oddáni modlitbě (“Be Devoted to Prayer”)
- Hindi sermons, including परमेश्वर की इच्छा क्या है और हम इसे कैसे जानें ? (“What Is the Will of God and How Do We Know It?”)
- The Hungarian book Jézus Krisztus szenvedése, váltsághalála (Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die)
- Indonesian sermons, e. g. Kabar Baik Allah tentang Anak-Nya (“God’s Good News Concerning His Son”)
- The Korean booklet 우리가 기뻐하며 (In Our Joy)
- French sermons, such as Saint, saint, saint est le Seigneur des armées (“Holy, Holy, Holy Is the Lord of Hosts”)
- Persian resources, like چگونه همسایۀ مسلمانمان را محبت نماییم؟ (“How Shall we love our Muslim Neighbor?”)
Praise God for all that he is doing to make his Word heard among every tribe, tongue, and nation. In all of this, it is their aim that people everywhere would understand and embrace the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. It is through your support that they can continue there mission to reach the world through the web.
Tyler Kenney, Desiring God
Restored by Grace
“Man, by the apostasy, has become a most disordered and rebellious creature, opposing his Maker, as the First Cause—by self-dependence; as the Chief Good—by self- love; as the Highest Lord—by self-will; and as the Last End—by self-seeking. Thus he is quite disordered, and all his actions are irregular. But by regeneration the disordered soul is set right; this great change being, as the Scripture expresses it, the renovation of the soul after the image of God—in which self-dependence is removed by faith; self-love is removed by the love of God; self-will is removed by subjection and obedience to the will of God; and self-seeking is removed by self-denial. The darkened understanding is illuminated, the refractory will sweetly subdued, the rebellious appetite gradually conquered. Thus the soul which sin had universally depraved, is by grace restored.”
John Flavel
His Power, Your Weakness
Our weakness is the place where we learn to depend on his power. When we’re stripped of everything that we thought we could trust in, when we’re absolutely desperate for help, the Lord moves into our circumstances and demonstrates his power. Sometimes he shows us his power by changing the circumstance, miraculously accomplishing what we could never accomplish. At other times he shows us how his sustaining grace enables us to endure situations that otherwise would crush us. Sometimes he makes us feel his strengthening arm upholding us in the trial. At other times he teaches us to walk by faith, believing that his arm is there even though we don’t feel it. It is in these varied circumstances that we learn of his greatness, his sustaining grace, and his ability to glorify himself in ways we would never have imagined.
We think that compliant children will best teach us about his grace and the gospel, and they can. Compliant, beleving children are frequently reflections of his great kindness. But the Lord also teaches us of his grace and the gospel through difficult children. We learn what it is like to love like he loved. We learn how to walk in his footsteps, and it is there, in our personal “upper room,” where we learn how to wash the feet of those who are betraying us. It is there, kneeling before our rebellious children, that the real power of God is demonstrated. The compliant child’s life lies to us, assuring us that she is good because we’re such good parents. Difficult children tell us the truth: God loves his enemies, and he can infuse us with grace that will make us lay down our lives for them too. Their rebellion is a verification of the gospel: we produce sinful children because we are sinners, but God loves sinners. God’s power is displayed through our failures when we tether ourselves to the gospel message of sin and forgiveness, no matter how desperate the situation becomes.
Elyse Fitzparick, Give Them Grace
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All-Sufficient Grace
God’s sustaining power is seen and developed in our weakness and failure. It is never developed anywhere else. The power of Christ flows through parents who boast in and embrace their personal weakness, not on those who think they don’t need it. Of course, every one of us will quickly confess that we know we need the power of Christ. Yes, yes, of course we do. But the veracity of our confident confession will be tested in our response to our weakness and failure and to the weakness, failure, and sin of our children. Do we see these trials as God’s gift to us? Do we see our children’s struggles as our Savior approaching us in love to make his grace strong in our lives? Do we believe that we must have this kind of humiliation so that Christ’s grace will flow through us to our family? Do we want his grace that much? Do we really want to glorify him?
Whether or not we like it, whether or not we understand it, it is kind of the Lord to demolish our confidence in our own strengths, abilities, and cherished methods. True, it doesn’t feel kind at the time. It’s terribly painful to watch your beloved son turn from the faith or to hear that your daughter has been disruptive in Sunday school again. It crushes our hearts when we try to explain the gospel to our little ones and they stare back at us in boredom and resentment. Yet, it is a kindness when he strips us of self-reliance, because it is there, in our emptiness and brokenness, that we experience the privilege of his sustaining grace. It is only when we arrive at that dreaded place of weakness that we discover the surpassing power of Christ. It is only when we are finally freed from those oh-so- constricting straightjackets of self-righteousness that we are able to experience the true comfort and warmth of the robes of his righteousness.
Elyse Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace
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Go and Tell Your Father
The remembrance of Christ’s intercession, our Father’s love for us, and our desperation are the fuel we need to build the fire of fervent prayer in our hearts. Guilt won’t do it. Laws about it will only crush us or make us self-righteous like the Pharisess in Luke 18. What we need is grace. And we need his grace in our parenting too. We need grace to see him everywhere, grace to lavish on our children. Remember, we only maintain that our confidence can not rest on anything else than the mercy of God alone.
We know that being a busy mom or dad frequently does make us feel as though we just don’t have time to pray. Pray? I can barely breathe! Even if that’s the case, if you ask for grace, the Lord will enable you to carry on a nonstop conversation with Him in your heart all day long. Lord, please grant us mercy now. Lord, I need your grace to respond to the bickering with gentleness now. Lord, please give me wisdom to see the cross in this. This sort of unspoken prayer will help you begin to rely more on him than on yourself.
“It took me seventeen years to realize I couldn’t parent on my own. It was not a great spiritual insight, just a realistic observation, If I did not pray deliberately and reflectively for members of my family by name every morning, they’d kill each other.I was incapable of getting inside there hearts. I was desperate. But even more I could not change my self-confident heart….[I came to realize that] I did my best parenting by prayer. I began to speak less to the kids and more to God.It was actually quite relaxing. “ Paul Miller
All christian parents are missionaries. We are all on a mission to the Lord to announce the love of the Father to our children, and to encourage them, as much as we can, to believe it. We’re to tell them of the law so that they know that they need rescue, and then we’re to tell them of the Rescuer who has freed them from the laws curse. But this monumental task is utterly impossible to accomplish on our own. We need rescue; we need a Rescuer too. So we need to pray for help.
Are your prayers weak, scrambled, inconsistent, self-centered? Of course they are. If we think they are any thing else, we are very close to sliding into the self-righteous prayer that Jesus warned us about in Luke 18. Even so, we can take heart because the true cries of our heart are always voiced by the beloved Son, our great High Priest (Hebrews 7:25). So, lean on Him. Don’t be afraid that you will fail at this. Don’t think he’ll judge you because you don’t say the right words with the right inflection and all the proper theology. Don’t think that he will sniff at your requests because your family is such a mess. Be assured that these things will never happen, for one simple reason: the record of our prayer has all ready been written. The Father hears the perfectly worded, properly believing, and flawlessly theologically correct prayers of His beloved Son when you pray.
We can freely pour out our heart to our Father knowing that our dear Savior will purify and transform our words into petitions that please Him. When your prayer is freely spoken, joyful and honest, your children will learn to pray that way too. Teach them that he is the high King of heaven, yes, a person not to be trifled with. But also teach them that He is there dear Father, one who delights to hear their request, even when they say them all wrong and don’t have much faith and mumble them as a last resort. Go tell your Father about everything that is in your heart, and don’t be afraid. The Lord Jesus is mediating for all of us.
Elyse Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace
