Who Am I In Christ?
The salt of the earth (Matt.5:13)
The light of the world (Matt.5:14)
A child of God (John 1:12)
A part of the true vine, a channel of Christ’s life (John 15:1,5)
Christ’s friend (John 15:15)
Chosen & appointed by Christ to bear Hid fruit (John 15:16)
Enslaved to God (Rom. 6:22)
A slave of righteousness (Rom.6:18)
A son of God; God is my spiritual Father (Rom. 8:14; Gal. 3:26; 4:6)
Joint heir with Christ, sharing His inheritance with Him (Rom. 8:17)
A temple- a- dwelling- place -of- God. His Spirit and His life dwells in me (1 Cor. 3:16)
United to the Lord and am one spirit with Him (1 Cor. 6:17)
A member of Christ’s Body(1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 5:30)
Reconciled to God & a minister of reconciliation (2 Cor.5:18,19)
A son of God & one in Christ (Gal.3:26,28)
An heir of God since I am a son of God (Gal 4:6,7)
A saint (Eph. 1:1; 1 Cor 1:2; Phil 1:1; Col. 1:2)
God’s workmanship, His handiwork, born anew in Christ to do His work ( Eph.2:10)
A fellow citizen with the rest of God’s family (Eph. 2:19)
A prisoner of Christ (Eph. 2:19)
Righteous and holy (Eph. 4:24)
A citizen of heaven, seated in heaven right now (Phil. 3:20; Eph. 2:6)
Hidden with Christ in God (Col.3:3)
An expression of the life of Christ because He is my life (Col3:4)
Chosen by God, holy $ dearly loved (Col, 3:12; 1 Thes. 1:4)
A son of light and not of darkness (1 Thes 5:5)
A holy partaker of a heavenly calling (Heb3:1)
A partaker of Christ; I share in His life ( Heb 3:1)
One of God’s living stones, being built up in Christ as a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5)
A member of a chosen race, a royal pricehood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession (1 Peter 2:9-10)
An alien & stranger to this world in which I temporarily live (1 John 3:1-2)
A child of God & I will resemble Christ when He returns (1 John 3:1-2)
Born of God, & the evil one,the devil, cannot touch me (1 John 5:18)
Not the great “I Am” (Exodus 3:14; John 8:24,28,58), but by the grace of God, I am what I am (1 Cor. 15:10)
Trifling with God
A physician says, “That medicine will heal you.” The patient replies, “I want to see that it does heal me before I take it.” The man is a fool, and so are you if that is how you trifle with God. You must believe the gospel on the evidence of God, and not otherwise, or your faith is not faith in God at all. The faith which he commanded in the gospel is faith in the record which God has given concerning his Son, a faith which takes God at his word. Believe then, on the Lord Jesus Christ and you have believed God to be true: refuse to trust in Jesus Christ, unless you get some other evidence beyond the witness of God, and you have practically said that God’s testimony is not enough, that is to say, you have made God a liar.
Spurgeon
Heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind
“Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.
Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and the history of the Church confirms it. So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards decline along with it. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God.
Before the Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is, and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.”
- A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy
Religion vs Gospel
Grace is freedom from the curse of works (Gal. 3:10), freedom from condemnation (Gal 2:15), freedom from slavery (Gal. 5:1) and freedom to worship and obey Jesus by the power of the Spirit (Gal. 5:16). Religion can never love or honor Jesus – it is ashamed of and offended (Gal. 5:11) by the gospel that declares all as sinners in need of a Savior. Religion says you can save yourself. Religion is “another gospel.”
What gospel are you spreading like a wildfire in your church or life? Grace? Or Religion?
Tim Keller shows the difference between Religion and Gospel in his new publication, Gospel in Life Study Guide (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 16.
The Plain Gospel
Do you not understand it? Christ bore the wrath of God, instead of those who trust him. Jesus Christ took the sins of all who trust him, and was punished in the room and stead of every believer, so that God will not punish a believer, because he has punished Christ for him. Christ died for the man who believes in him, so that it would be injustice on the part of God to punish that man, for how shall he punish twice for the same offense?
Faith is the seal and evidence that you were redeemed nineteen hundred years ago upon the bloody tree of Calvary, and you are justified, and who shall lay anything to your charge. “It is God that justifies you: who is he that condemns you? It is Christ that died; yea, rather, that is risen again.” This is the gospel of your salvation.
Spurgeon
Righteous Grace
Here the work of Christ comes in; and the cross of the Sin-bearer answers the question which conscience has raised, – “Is it righteous grace?” It is this great work of propitiation that exhibits God as “the just God, yet the Savior;”not only righteous in spite of his justifying the ungodly, but righteous in doing so. It shows salvation as an act of righteousness; nay, one of the highest acts of righteousness that a righteous God can do. It shows pardon not only as the deed of a righteous God, but as the thing which shows how righteous he is, and how he hates and condemns the very sin that he is pardoning.
Hear the word of the Lord concerning this “finished” work. “Christ died for our sins.” “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.” “Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many.” “He gave himself for us.” “He was delivered for our offences.” “He gave himself for our sins.” “Christ died for the ungodly.” “He hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” “Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh.” “Christ hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust.” “His own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.”
These expressions speak of something more than love. Love is in each of them; the deep, true, real love of God; but also justice and holiness; inflexible and inexorable adherence to law. They have no meaning apart from law; law as the foundation, pillar, keystone of the universe.
But their connection with law is also their connection with love. For as it was law, in its unchangeable perfection, that constituted the necessity for the Surety’s death, so it was this necessity that drew out the Surety’s love, and gave also glorious proof of the love of him who made him to be sin for us. For if a man were to die for another, when there was no necessity for his doing so, we should hardly call his death a proof of love. At best, such would be foolish love, or, at least, a fond and idle way of showing it. But to die for one, when there is really need of dying, is the true test of genuine love. To die for a friend when nothing less will save him; this is the proof of love! When either he or we must die; and when he, to save us from dying, dies himself, this is love. There was need of a death, if we were to be saved from dying. Righteousness made the necessity. And, to meet this terrible necessity, the Son of God took flesh and died! He died, because it was written, “The soul that sinneth it shall die.” Love led him down to the cradle; love led him up to the cross! He died as the sinner’s substitute. He died to make it a righteous thing in God to cancel the sinner’s guilt and annul the penalty of his everlasting death.
Had it not been for this dying, grace and guilt could not have looked each other in the face; God and the sinner could not have come nigh; righteousness would have forbidden reconciliation; and righteousness, we know, is as divine and real a thing as love. Without this exception, it would not have been right for God to receive the sinner nor safe for the sinner to come.
But now, mercy and truth have met together; now grace is righteousness, and righteousness is grace. This satisfies the sinner’s conscience, by showing him righteous love for the unrighteous and unlovable. It tells him, too, that the reconciliation brought about in this way shall never be disturbed, either in this life or that which is to come. It is righteous reconciliation, and will stand every test, as well as last throughout eternity. The peace of conscience thus secured will be trial-proof, sickness-proof, deathbed-proof, judgment-proof. Realizing this, the chief of sinners can say, “Who is he that condemneth?”
What peace for the stricken conscience is there in the truth that Christ died for the ungodly; and that it is of the ungodly that the righteous God is the Justifier! The righteous grace thus coming to us through the sin-bearing work of the “Word made flesh,” tells the soul, at once and forever, that there can be no condemnation for any sinner upon earth, who will only consent to be indebted to this free love of God, which, like a fountain of living water, is bursting freely forth from the foot of the Cross.
Just, yet the Justifier of the ungodly! What glad tidings are here! Here is grace; God’s free love to the sinner; divine bounty and goodwill, altogether irrespective of human worth or merit. For this is the scriptural meaning of that often misunderstood word “grace.”
This righteous free love has its origin in the bosom of the Father, where the only begotten has his dwelling. It is not produced by anything out of God himself. It was man’s evil, not his good, that called it forth. It was not the drawing to the like, but to the unlike; it was light attracted by darkness, and life by death. It does not wait for our seeking, it comes unasked as well as undeserved. It is not our faith that creates it or calls it up; our faith realizes it as already existing in its divine and manifold fullness. Whether we believe it or not, this righteous grace exists, and exists for us. Unbelief refuses it; but faith takes it, rejoices in it, and lives upon it. Yes, faith takes this righteous grace of God, and, with it, a righteous pardon, a righteous salvation, and a righteous heirship of the everlasting glory.
Horatius Bonar
Profiting from the Word
A man profits from the Word as he discovers God’s demands upon him; His undeviating demands, for He changes not. It is a great and grievous mistake to suppose that in this present dispensation God has lowered His demands, for that would necessarily imply that His previous demand was a harsh and unrighteous one. Not so! “The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (Rom. 7:12). The sum of God’s demands is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deut. 6:5); and the Lord Jesus repeated it in Matthew 22:37. The apostle Paul enforced the same when he wrote, “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ let him be Anathema” (1 Cor. 16:22).
A man profits from the Word when he discovers how entirely and how sinfully he has failed to meet God’s demands. And let us point out for the benefit of any who may take issue with the last paragraph that no man can see what a sinner he is, how infinitely short he has fallen of measuring up to God’s standard, until he has a clear sight of the exalted demands of God upon him! Just in proportion as preachers lower God’s standard of what He requires from every human being, to that extent will their hearers obtain an inadequate and faulty conception of their sinfulness, and the less will they perceive their need of an almighty Savior. But once a soul really perceives what are God’s demands upon him, and how completely and constantly he has failed to render Him His due, then does he recognize what a desperate situation he is in. The law must be preached before any are ready for the Gospel.
A man profits from the Word when he is taught therefrom that God, in His infinite grace, has fully provided for His people’s meeting His own demands. At this point, too, much present-day preaching is seriously defective. There is being given forth what may loosely be termed a “half Gospel,” but which in reality is virtually a denial of the true Gospel. Christ is brought in, yet only as a sort of make-weight. That Christ has vicariously met every demand of God upon all who believe upon Him is blessedly true, yet it is only a part of the truth. The Lord Jesus has not only vicariously satisfied for His people the requirements of God’s righteousness, but He has also secured that they shall personally satisfy them too. Christ has procured the Holy Spirit to make good in them what the Redeemer wrought for them.
A.W. Pink
One with Christ
” For salvation is often represented in terms of life. Paul wrote that God’s gift is eternal life (Romans 6:23), and John explained that those who have the Son have life (1 John 5:12). It’s also made clear that the distinctive feature of this life is not its eternity but its quality as the life of the new age. Eternal life is life lived in fellowship with God (John 17:3).
…So God came to us in Jesus Christ. He took our place, bore our sin and died our death. We had sinned. So we deserved to die. But he died instead of us. The simple statement ‘Christ died for sins’ is enough. He had no sins of his own for which he needed to die; he died for ours.
But his death cannot do us any good unless we claim its benefit for ourselves. It is by faith inwardly and by baptism outwardly that we become united to Christ in his death and resurrection. We have died and risen with him. Now therefore we must ‘count’ (or ‘reckon’) ourselves ‘dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 6:11)—not pretending we are immune to sin when we know we are not, but realizing and remembering the fact that, being one with Christ, the benefits of his death have become ours. We are ‘alive to God,’ alive through his death.”
John Stott
What Stops You from Changing?
The main reason we don’t change is our pride and self-reliance. In our pride we excuse or minimize or hide sin. Taking responsibility for our sin leads to repentance which in turn leads to forgiveness and freedom. Another reason we don’t change is that we don’t really want to. We want to avoid the consequences or shame of our sin, but still love the sin itself. We need to keep coming back to the cross. The cross humbles us and brings us near to God.
“The gospel, applied to our hearts every day, frees us to be brutally honest with ourselves and with God. The assurance of his total forgiveness of our sins through the blood of Christ means we don’t have to play defensive games anymore. We don’t have to rationalize and excuse our sins. We can say we told a lie instead of saying we exaggerated a bit. We can admit an unforgiving spirit instead of continuing to blame our parents for our emotional distress. We can call sin exactly what it is, regardless of how ugly and shameful it may be, because we know that Jesus bore that sin in his body on the cross. With the assurance of total forgiveness through Christ, we have no reason to hide from our sins anymore.” Jerry Bridges
In the Christian life:
• humbling is the way to exaltation
• dying to self is the way to new life
• poverty is the way to wealth
• grief is the way to joy
• hunger is the way to satisfaction
• selflessness the way to self-fulfilment
• shame is the way to glory
• folly is the way to wisdom
Tim Chester, You Can Change
Psalm 28 “Trusting God” by Pastor Michael Engle
Ever had “one of those days”? You shake your heads in agreement and we haven’t even discussed the particulars. We all just know we’ve had them, don’t we? Ever uttered the expression, “stop the world, I wanna get off” because life is just flying past and the commotion of the day, week, year is just a little too much at the time. We just past the mile stone of a new year…did you pray anything like, “please God, make it better than last year”? Life can be chaotic and noisy. Life can be downright hard. Sometimes the noise is not just noise; sometimes it’s the sound of the enemy attacking, sometimes the sound of the flesh, and sometimes the sound of a serpent slithering……………
Help for Addicts
When your allegiance is to something other than God, you will simultaneously feel both in control and out of control.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
If you are struggling with an addiction to a substance or to an activity, you already know a lot. Experience is a good teacher. You might not be an expert on how to get out of addiction but you certainly know what it’s like to have one, so you might resist anyone who wants to instruct you.
But if you are reading these words, you are trying to stay open and teachable. Please keep trying.
I’d like to stretch your understanding of your addiction. It will sound radical—anything that brings Jesus into your world will be subversive and contrary to your expectations. But it will make sense. The triune God is the source of all wisdom, and when we understand His wisdom it sounds true, right, and good.
So suspend your judgment for a moment. You might be an expert in your addiction, but consider the possibility that the God who made you knows best how to help you out of it. Don’t just read the following comments; wrestle with them, argue with them … and don’t stop wrestling and arguing until you find new and fresh hope in Jesus.
The ultimate reason for your addiction
If you are addicted to something, you continue in the addiction because you like it—or, more accurately, because you love it. We do the things we love, and we avoid doing the things we hate. The object of your addiction first attracted your attention, then you became infatuated, and then love grew.
What you didn’t anticipate is that love, whenever it is self-centered, matures into a form of worship—it becomes the focus of your life. And you are a slave to what you worship. This explains why you both desire your addiction and find that it’s a weight around your neck.
Having an addiction means you are worshipping something and are controlled by it. It owns you. The Bible tells us in 2 Peter 2:19 (ESV), “For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.” You think about it, plot how you will get more of it, dream about it when you don’t have it, and are willing to sacrifice almost anything to get it.
Your addiction is about you and God
If addiction is truly a form of worship, then it shouldn’t surprise you that it has something to do with God. This doesn’t mean you are thinking about God all the time. Addiction never seems personal. For example, if you are married you don’t think about your spouse in the midst of your addiction, but addiction is about your spouse. The lying, deceit, financial toll, and betrayal are all about your spouse.
Even more so, your addiction is about you and God. The reality is that all of life is tethered to God. Everything you do, if you really think about it, is about God.
When you try to avoid God and worship something other than him, you become a slave to what you are worshiping. Worship sex: become its slave. Worship cocaine: be owned by it. That’s the way God’s universe is constructed.
It’s all about allegiances. When your allegiance is to something other than God, you will simultaneously feel both in control and out of control. You will love your addiction and hate it. You will feel both alive and dead.
Welcome to the reality of sin. All false worship is sin, and sin, when you keep practicing it, will oppress you. Sin is the real diagnosis for addiction. Genetics, parents, peers, and many other factors can contribute, but the root is sin. This is not an immediate self-esteem enhancer, to be sure, but it is much more hopeful than you think. Sin is humanity’s root problem, and at the deepest places in your soul you are no different than anyone else. Sin is the root of all addiction.
Your biggest problem is not your addiction
No doubt you acknowledge that you sin once in a while, but you might be reluctant to call your addiction sin. Sin, we think, is conscious rebellion against God, and what you are doing doesn’t feel that way. Yet take this critical first step: acknowledge that addiction is against God. Sin is when you worship anything other than the true God.
Sin is voluntary. We choose it. And, it is also slavery. It dominates us. We need to turn from it and be delivered from it. But is your addictive behavior your biggest sin? No, but it does point to your biggest problem—your lack of relationship with the God who made you. Consider what your addiction says about your relationship to God.
- You believe you can manage your world apart from God.
- You believe there are places where you can hide from Him. You think God is like a person, only stronger, with more acute senses. Notice this: if you were being shadowed by someone extremely important to you—a spouse, a parent, a boss, a child—you probably wouldn’t be doing your addiction in the way you are now. Addictions thrive in the dark, where you think God can’t see you. Maybe you can relate to the Psalmist who said, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,” and then he noticed that he couldn’t hide from God, because “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day …” (Psalm 139:11-12).
- You love your addiction more than you love God. You think there are things more beautiful and satisfying than Him.
You have constructed a world that revolves around you and your desires and not around God. Your biggest sin is your desire to be, in effect, your own god—this is what fuels your addiction. You have broken the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).
Be willing to feel the weight of your rebellion against God, but don’t stop there. One of the many beautiful features of how God reveals himself in the Bible is that He is forgiving. As it says in 1 John 1:8-10, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”
Do you see how hopeful this is? If your addiction is an unconquerable compulsion, then you are stuck, but if your biggest problem is that you are a sinner, there is hope.
Jesus came into our world, died a terrible death, and rose again to save sinners. You can have a whole new life simply by admitting that you are a sinner and that you need Jesus to save you. This is called true faith or trust.
How do you live by faith as you struggle with addiction? Here are some suggestions:
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO
Speak honestly. Lies are the natural language of addiction. You have told a boatload. You have told lies to others. You have also told lies to yourself—blatant whoppers—and you have believed them. Do these sound familiar?
- “I can stop any time I want.”
- “I’m not like those people (other addicts). I would never _____ (use needles, drink alone, use my children’s food money, drink on the job, watch sadistic pornography).”
Your lies are fueled by your pride, and they persist because of your shame. Now they are instinctive. In the beginning you might have noticed when you were lying, but after a while your conscience quieted down. Now lies are your natural speech—and you don’t even notice. Lies have become so natural that sometimes you lie even when the truth would work better.
Lies are the language of a particular kingdom. John 8:44 says, “When he [Satan] lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” When you speak you reveal your allegiances. When you speak the truth you are taking a first step toward the kingdom of God. But when you lie you are digging in your heels and preferring the comfort of darkness and the sense of independence that are part of Satan’s kingdom.
Here is where you must act. You have to stop being a robot controlled by your addiction, and make a decision. Pray for power to speak the truth, and then start to tell the truth. Tell the truth to one person. The Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the church in Ephesus that step one of leaving an addictive life is “having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor” (Ephesians 4:25).
Go public. When you begin to understand the wisdom of God you will find that humility is one of its most important aspects. Humility means acknowledging your need for help. Ask God for help and then, since God uses people to extend His help to us, ask other people for help.
Do this before you come up with 20 reasons why you shouldn’t. Your reasons might sound selfless (for example, you don’t want to embarrass or shame family members). But ignore your excuses. Run from them.
Get a plan. Do you want to change? Evaluate your resolve by developing a plan and implementing it. Be radical, ruthless, and violent (Matthew 5:29, 30; 11:12).
If you are hoping that your addiction will go away without a fight, then you don’t really want to get rid of it. When you look for a job you don’t say, “God, beam me to the right job today, while I watch TV.” Instead you make a plan. In the same way, you need a strategy for how you will fight your addiction. Ask for help, and once again, be suspicious of any of your excuses.
Make Jesus central. You probably know that most treatments for addiction include “god as you understand him.” You have many options for this “god,” but be careful. If you invent your own god you will have the same problem you always had—you trying to be god. You need something way more powerful than your conception of God, which is only a mix of your desires and fears. You need to know the God.
There is only one God who could never be invented by our desires. The true God delights in being known. He is the only God who entered human history and humbled himself to become a part of His creation. This God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Jesus is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). If your eyes aren’t on Him, you will be lured from one form of false worship and slavery to another.
God has determined that real change must go through Jesus. Anything else would dishonor Him. Try to change apart from Jesus and you might remove a few hassles from your own kingdom, but you will eventually be enslaved to something else. The next addiction might be safer, but it will still dominate you. Real change happens when you confess your sin, ask Jesus for forgiveness, and then live with Jesus’ death, resurrection, and growing kingdom at the center of your everyday life.
To make Jesus central you will need help. You will need to read the Bible. God speaks in various ways but His clearest and most common communication to us is through the Bible. The book of Mark is a good place to start. Also, find others who follow Jesus. You probably already know someone who does. If not, ask around. Look for people who believe that Jesus is the God who came to earth, died for our sins, and rose from the dead.
Find a church. What does a church have to do with addictions? A good church is like Alcoholics Anonymous, but better because it points you to Jesus. Remember, God’s wise plan is to use people to help us. He uses a community. You are not created to be isolated, and you weren’t created to change apart from a community. If you have no leads on a church, check your phone book and look for churches that say something about Jesus Christ in their advertising.
Live with hope. Don’t believe Satan’s lie that you can’t change. The gospel of Jesus Christ is all about changing what you desire, filling you with a new Spirit, and giving you a beautiful and fruitful life of love toward God and others. When you daily repent of trying to be your own god, daily ask God to fill you with Himself, and daily take the steps of faith outlined above, then you will see that God is present and active in your life.
Don’t be surprised when you fall back into temptation, but remember that God’s mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:21-23). Every morning you can repent of your sins, ask for the Spirit of God, and begin again to live by faith. Every Christian is called to do these things every day. Why don’t you join them?
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What about Alcoholics Anonymous?
The most popular resource for addictions is AA. You can find meetings everywhere. You will probably notice, however, that if you say the name of Jesus in AA you will get looks that say, “Don’t use the J-word again.” AA meetings are a fine reminder that you are not alone and that you must never let your guard down to your addictive desires. But at AA meetings you will not hear addiction called sin, and you will not be pointed toward Jesus Christ. If you choose to go to AA meetings, be sure to have a mentor who has experience in walking with Jesus.
Can I really change?
Read the book of Mark, then read Acts. You will see that people change. When Jesus Christ ascended to His throne in heaven, He sent His Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of power, and He makes us look more and more like Jesus.
So can you change? Absolutely. You should tremble at the thought of God working in you (Philippians 2:12, 13). The process, however, will seem like two steps forward and one step back. It is gradual. If it was any other way you wouldn’t have to depend on Jesus all the time, which is exactly what He wants you to do.
If change is particularly stubborn, ask yourself this question: Do I really want to change? You will find all kinds of reasons why you aren’t changing, but this question might point you to the real culprit.
Edward T. Welch
A Catechism on the Heart
The first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart (Deut. 6:5). That is why, in replacing Saul as king, God “sought out a man after his own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14), for “the Lord looks on the heart” (16:7). It is a truism to say that, in terms of our response to the gospel, the heart of the matter is a matter of the heart. But truism or not, it is true. Let’s map out some preliminary matters in the form of a catechism on the heart:
Q.1. What is the heart?
A. The heart is the central core and drive of my life intellectually (it involves my mind), affectionately (it shapes my soul), and totally (it provides the energy for my living).
Q.2. Is my heart healthy?
A. No. By nature I have a diseased heart. From birth, my heart is deformed and antagonistic to God. The intentions of its thoughts are evil continually.
Q.3. Can my diseased heart be healed?
A. Yes. God, in His grace, can give me a new heart to love Him and to desire to serve Him.
Q.4. How does God do this?
A. God does this through the work of the Lord Jesus for me and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in me. He illumines my mind through the truth of the gospel, frees my enslaved will from its bondage to sin, cleanses my affections by His grace, and motivates me inwardly to live for Him by rewriting His law into my heart so that I begin to love what He loves. The Bible calls this being “born from above.”
Q.5. Does this mean I will never sin again?
A. No. I will continue to struggle with sin until I am glorified. God has given me a new heart, but for the moment He wants me to keep living in a fallen world. So day by day I face the pressures to sin that come from the world, the flesh, and the Devil. But God’s Word promises that over all these enemies I can be “more than a conqueror through him who loved us.”
Q.6. What four things does God counsel me to do so that my heart may be kept for Him?
A. First, I must guard my heart as if everything depended on it. This means that I should keep my heart like a sanctuary for the presence of the Lord Jesus and allow nothing and no one else to enter.
Second, I must keep my heart healthy by proper diet, growing strong on a regular diet of God’s Word — reading it for myself, meditating on its truth, but especially being fed on it in the preaching of the Word. I also will remember that my heart has eyes as well as ears. The Spirit shows me baptism as a sign that I bear God’s triune name, while the Lord’s Supper stimulates heart love for the Lord Jesus.
Third, I must take regular spiritual exercise, since my heart will be strengthened by worship when my whole being is given over to God in expressions of love for and trust in Him.
Fourth, I must give myself to prayer in which my heart holds on to the promises of God, rests in His will, and asks for His sustaining grace — and do this not only on my own but with others so that we may encourage one another to maintain a heart for God.
This — and much else — requires development, elaboration, and exposition. But it can be summed up in a single biblical sentence. Listen to your Father’s appeal: “My son, give Me your heart.”
Sinclair Ferguson
Me, Myself, and I
We sin because we desire or worship idols instead of God. The Bible talks about ‘the sinful desires of our hearts’. Whenever a desire controls our hearts it has become an idol. It can be a desire for a good thing which has become bigger than God. We need to turn from our sinful desires to worship and serve God = ‘repentance’. Repentance is a life-long, continuous activity of weeding out the roots of sin from our hearts. We repent by faith as we believe God is bigger and better than our sinful desires.
‘People tend to think of sins in the plural as consciously willed acts where one was aware of and chose not to do the righteous alternative … This instinctive view of sin infects many Christians and almost all non-Christians … The Bible’s view of sin certainly includes the high-handed sins … But sin also includes what we simply are, and the perverse ways we think, want, remember, and react. ‘Most sin is invisible to the sinner because it is simply how the sinner works… The core insanity of the human heart is that we violate the first great commandment. We will love anything, except God, unless our madness is checked by grace.
‘People do not tend to see sin as applying to relatively unconscious problems, to the deep, interesting, and bedevilling stuff in our hearts. But God’s descriptions of sin often highlight the unconscious aspect. Sin – the desires we pursue, the beliefs we hold, the habits we obey as second nature – is intrinsically deceitful. If we knew we were deceived, we would not be deceived … Sin is a darkened mind, drunkenness, animal-like instinct and compulsion, madness, slavery, ignorance, stupor. People often think that to define sin as unconscious removes human responsibility. How can we be culpable for what we did not sit down and choose to do? But the Bible takes the opposite track. The unconscious and semiconscious nature of much sin simply testifies to the fact that we are steeped in it. Sinners think, want, and act sinlike by nature, nurture, and practice.’ (David Powlison)
Tim Chester, You Can Change
Law Without Gospel Makes People Give Up
Moralism Produces Immorality
The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn’t make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn’t produce morality; rather, it produces immorality. We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to licentiousness. In fact, the law alone stirs up licentiousness. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law.
To be sure, the Spirit does use the whole Word in our sanctification: the law as well as the gospel. But the law and the gospel do very different things. The law reveals sin but is powerless to remove sin. It points to righteousness but can’t produce it. It shows us what godliness is, but it cannot make us godly. As Martin Luther said, “Sin is not canceled by lawful living, for no person is able to live up to the Law. Nothing can take away sin except the grace of God.”
The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn’t make people work harder, it makes them give up.
Law Crushes, Gospel Cures
The law is impotent–it has no strength, it has no power, it offers us nothing. Sinners already are powerless to obey the demands of the law, and the law offers them no assistance–absolutely none. Law apart from gospel can only crush. It can’t cure.
The law could promise life to me,
If my obedience perfect be;
But grace does promise life upon
My Lord’s obedience alone.
The law says, Do, and life you’ll win;
But grace says, Live, for all is done;
The former cannot ease my grief,
The latter yields me full relief. (Ralph Erskine, 1745)
So, the law serves us by showing us how to love God and others. But we fail to do this every day. And when we fail, it is the gospel which brings comfort by reminding us that God’s infinite approval of us doesn’t depend on our keeping of the law but on Christ’s keeping of the law for us. And guess what? This makes me want to obey him more, not less!
As Spurgeon wrote, “When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast to think that I could ever have rebelled against One who loved me so, and sought my good.” Indeed, it is “the kindness of the Lord that leads to repentance” (Romans 2:4).
The Gospel of Change
How does God grow and change us while we live here on earth? What has Christ given to help me with that tough conversation with my spouse last Tuesday night? How does His grace impact a person’s struggle with depression or fear? What provision has He made for my struggles with lust or fear?
What do repentance and change actually look like? Why do we struggle with one area of sin more than another, doing the thing we never intended to do?
We believe that you can know why you do the things you do. You can have a clear sense of where change is needed in your life and what that change should look like. You can understand what God is doing in the present and how you can be part of it.
Five gospel perspectives are critical to understand:
#1: The extent and gravity of our sin
It has been said that the biblical doctrine of sin is the one doctrine you can prove empirically, yet we all tend to minimize it.
Early in our marriage my wife, Luella, graciously pointed out many failures in my [Paul] love for her. She wasn’t being overly critical; she had seen real areas of sin rooted in wrong attitudes in my heart. I knew she loved me and I knew she wasn’t crazy, but I simply couldn’t believe that I was as bad as she was making me out to be!
I look back and cringe at how self-righteous I was. Self-righteousness is your own personal defense attorney. In a scary moment of self-defense, I said to her, Ninety-five percent of the women in our church would love to be married to me! (How’s that for humility?) Luella sweetly informed me that she was in the other five percent!
I was a pastor at the time. I was regularly counseling married couples, helping them deal with the sin that stood in the way of the loving unity God intended for them. I was good at helping other people see and own their sin. But I was not willing to believe that my need was just as desperate. Maybe I was blinded by my theological knowledge or my pastoral skill. But one thing is sure: I had forgotten who I was, and I was offended that Luella had such a low opinion of me!
I don’t think I alone. The struggle to accept our exceeding sinfulness is everywhere in the church of Christ. We accept the doctrine of total depravity when we are approached about our own sin, we wrap our robes of self-righteousness around us and rise to our own defense.
Scripture challenges this self-righteousness with clarity and power: The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time (Genesis 6:5, NIV), and There is no one righteous, not even one (Romans 3:10). The effects of sin twist every thought, motive, desire, word, and action. This disease has infected us all, and the consequences are severe.
Why is this perspective so essential? Only when you accept the bad news of the gospel does the good news make any sense. The grace, restoration, reconciliation, forgiveness, mercy, patience, power, healing, and hope of the gospel are for sinners. They are only meaningful to you if you admit that you have the disease and realize that it is terminal.
#2: The centrality of the heart
The heart is the real you, the essential you. All of the ways in which the Bible refers to the inner person (mind, emotions, spirit, soul, will, etc.) are summed up with this one term: heart. The heart is the steering wheel of every human being. Everything we do is shaped and controlled by what our hearts desire.
That is why the Bible is very clear that God wants our hearts. Only when God has your heart does He have you. As much as we are affected by our broken world and the sins of others against us, our greatest problem is the sin that resides in our hearts. That is why the message of the gospel is that God transforms our lives by transforming our hearts.
Lasting change always comes through the heart. This is one of Scripture’s most thoroughly developed themes, but many of us have missed its profound implications. We need a deeper understanding of Proverbs 4:23, Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.
#3: The present benefits of Christ
The Christian hope is more than a redemptive system with practical principles that can change your life. The hope of every Christian is a person, the Redeemer, Jesus Christ. He is the wisdom behind every biblical principle and the power we need to live them out. Because Christ lives inside us today, because He rules all things for our sakes (Ephesians 2:22-23), and because He is presently putting all His enemies under His feet (1 Corinthians 15:25-28), we can live with courage and hope.
Our hope is not in our biblical knowledge or our experience within the body of Christ. We are thankful for these things, yet we hold onto one hope: Christ. In Him we find everything we need to live a godly life in the here and now. Paul captures it so well: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20).
#4: God’s call to growth and change
From the time we come to Christ until the time we go home to be with Him, God calls us to change. We have been changed by His grace, are being changed by His grace, and will be changed by His grace.
What is the goal of this change? It is more than a better marriage, well-adjusted children, professional success, or freedom from a few nagging sins. God’s goal is that we would actually become like Him. He doesn’t just want you to escape the fires of hell–though we praise God that through Christ you can! His goal is to free us from our slavery to sin, our bondage to self, and our functional idolatry, so that we actually take on His character!
Peter summarizes the change this way: Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires (2 Peter 1:4).
#5: A lifestyle of repentance and faith
God has blessed you with His grace, gifted you with His presence, strengthened you with His power, and made you the object of His eternal love. Because we belong to Him, we live for His agenda. And if change is His agenda, then repentance and faith is the lifestyle to which we have been called.
Near the end of his career, Michael Jordan was asked why he always came early to practice before a game, even before the rookies. He was already being called the greatest basketball player of all time. He replied that his shooting percentage was just over 50 percent. That meant that over his career, he had failed almost as much as he had succeeded. He was committed to keep on practicing as long as there was room for him to improve.
There are always new sins for the Christian to address and new enemies to defeat. The Christian life makes God’s work of change our paradigm for living, while we celebrate the grace that makes it possible. “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present a ge, while we wait for the blessed hope–the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. (Titus 2:11-13).
Your hope
No matter what you struggle with now, no matter how successful or stuck you see yourself to be, no matter how young or how old you are in the faith, no matter if you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, if you are Christ’s child, there is hope for you! It is not based on who you are or what you know. Your hope is Jesus! He lives in you and, because of that, you have a reason to celebrate each new day. You no longer live, but Christ lives in you! We welcome you to a lifestyle of celebrating just what that means.
Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp
