Most of us have tried to pack a present in a box that wouldn’t fit. The gospel is that way. We just can't contain it. We never really grasp it. As Paul says, because of the vastness of its dimensions, God's love for his people "surpasses knowledge."
“16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge–that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” ~ Eph. 3:16-19
Getting grace is like knowing God. The finite seeking to understand the infinite. Yes, God is knowable, but not exhaustively knowable. The same is true with the gospel.
I heard someone say recently that we may be aware of about 4% of our sin, which means we probably get (and this is in my opinion a great overstatement) 4% of God's grace. This means we have plenty of gospel learning to do—which means we have plenty of gospel preaching and hearing to do.
So, if you are a preacher, lift up the cross of Jesus tomorrow and give them pure, undilluted, unmixed grace. Give them Jesus.
And if you will be attending a gathering of believers, listen well. Listen for the cross and believe. Listen for grace and believe. Listen for the Savior and believe, so that "you may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ."
Here is a summary (Part 2) from last weeks Grace and Men Conference at Perimeter Church. For Part 1, just go here. The notes below are from Tullian Tchividjian's talk on Galatians 5:16-26.
Obviously, there is much more to say. Nevertheless, I think it helps us see that that a radical justification focus is the critical element in bringing about the radically sanctified life. After all, we are not sanctified by talking about sanctification, but through living in union with Jesus as our perfect righteousness. In other words, the root of positional justification produces the fruit of progressive sanctification.
Or as John Bunyan said, "Run, run the law demands, but gives me neither feet nor hands; 'tis better news the gospel brings: it bids me fly and gives me wings."
A friend sent me a devotion that described the saving of a lamb by a shepherd. Here is the account:
I was visiting a sheep farm with a group of students once and we got to witness the birth of a little lamb. The shepherd was there watching over the process. When the lamb was delivered there was a mucous plug blocking its throat. It couldn’t breathe. It was dying. The shepherd jumped into the pen, grabbed the little lamb and, without hesitation, placed his mouth over the lamb’s nose and mouth and sucked hard pulling that mucous plug into his own mouth. The little lamb bleated and began to breath. It was, simultaneously, the grossest and most beautiful thing I’ve personally witnessed.
As is the cross, where Jesus ingested the mucous plug of our sin so that we can live. It is simultaneously the most unpleasant, yet most beautiful thing we can witness—to the praise of God's glorious grace!
The Gospel Man ministry held another "Grace and Men Conference" this past weekend at Perimeter Church in Atlanta. The two speakers were Scotty Smith and Tullian Tchividjian. Although I cannot do them justice for the content that they presented and the enthusiasm with which they presented it, I do want to give a summary of their teaching. The audio should be available soon. When it is, I'll let you know and give you are hearty "imperative" that you must go and listen. ;)
This first post (there is just too much good stuff to cover in one post!) is primarly a summary of Tullian's first message on Jesus + Nothing = Everything, based on Luke 4:18-19.
NOTE 1: It is this last point that emphasizes that justifying grace must not be disconnected from sanctifying grace. Theologically, they should be distinguished, but never separated, since it is faith in the justifying work of Jesus (John 15:4-5 / abiding in Jesus as my righteousness) that fills us with the Spirit and enables us to produce his fruit (Galatians 3:1-5; 5:16ff). This is why preaching and teaching on justification is so crucial, not just for positional righeousness, but for progressive righteousness (sanctification) and is why folks talk about "preaching the gospel to yourself every day." In other words, it is the nature of grace to sanctify.
NOTE 2: When we speak of grace and gospel, we mean the substance of the person and work of Jesus, who died for our sin (as a legal substitute, not merely as a moral example). Grace requres law. It requires bad news (my total failure to fulfill the law) in order to have good news (grace=forgiveness, imputed righteousness, eternal love in adoption). So, to speak of grace and gospel is to speak of the person of Jesus and the benefits we receive from him through faith in his finished, redemptive, reconciling work on the cross.
Since this weekend is the Grace for Men Conference at Perimeter Church, I thought I'd have one of the speakers, Tullian Tchividjian, be our guest blogger today. In this post, he writes about the necessity to have gospel idicatives empower gospel imperatives.
"People need to hear less about what we need to do for God and more about all that God has already done for us, because imperatives minus indicatives equal impossibilities. If you’re a preacher and you’re assuming that people understand the radical nature of gospel indicatives, so your ministry is focused primarily on gospel imperatives, you’re making a huge mistake. A huge mistake!
"Long-term, sustained, gospel-motivated obedience can only come from faith in what Jesus has already done, not fear of what we must do. To paraphrase Ray Ortlund, any obedience not grounded in or motivated by the gospel is unsustainable. No matter how hard you try, how radical you get, any engine smaller than the gospel that you’re depending on for power to obey will conk out in due time.So let’s take it up a notch. Don’t be afraid to preach the radical nature of the gospel of grace. For, as the late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said, 'If your preaching of the gospel doesn't provoke the charge from some of antinomianism, you're not preaching the gospel.'"
From his book, Surprised by Grace.
Since tonight and tomorrow morning is the Grace for Men Conference at Perimeter Church, I thought I'd have one of the speakers, Tullian Tchividjian, be our guest blogger for the weekend. Today, he writes about why lots of us a afraid of radical grace. Tomorrow, he describes the importance of having all gospel imperatives being driven and empowered by gospel indicatives. For first a post on why we fear radical grace:
"The biggest lie about grace that Satan wants the church to buy is the idea that grace is dangerous and therefore needs to be “kept it in check.” By believing this we not only prove we don’t understand grace, but we violate gospel advancement in our lives and in the church. A “yes, grace...but” disposition is the kind of fearful posture that keeps moralism swirling around in our hearts and in the church. “ Any obedience not grounded in or motivated by the gospel is unsustainable. ” I understand the fear of grace.
"As a pastor, one of my responsibilities is to disciple people into a deeper understanding of obedience—teaching them to say “no” to the things God hates and “yes” to the things God loves. But all too often I have (wrongly) concluded that the only way to keep licentious people in line is to give them more rules. The fact is, however, that the only way licentious people start to obey is when they get a taste of God’s radical unconditional acceptance of sinners.
"The irony of gospel-based sanctification is that those who end up obeying more are those who increasingly realize that their standing with God is not based on their obedience, but Christ’s.The people who actually end up performing better are those who understand that their relationship with God doesn’t depend on their performance for Jesus, but Jesus’ performance for us."
From Tullian's book, Surprised by Grace
Below is an adapted version of Rod Rosenbladt's article, "Christ Died for the Sins of Christians, Too," where he discusses the need to emphasize the "alien" character of the gospel—the fact that the message about Jesus is primarily something outside of us, rahter than inside of us. There is an "inside" work of God, but it is fully dependent on the "outside" work of the cross. In other words, the gospel is primarily declaration, and only secondarily transformation/renovation. Read the full article here.
This "alien" nature of the gospel is a primary theme in the New Testament: Christ's death was outside of me and for me. It is not primarily something that changes me. After one has been declared righteous by grace through faith, this grace will begin to change us (sanctification). Nevertheless, its changing us is certainly not what justifies us. In Roman Catholicism, and in some forms of American Evangelicalism (like John Wesley's work), however, the accent falls on actual moral transformation. In other words, what makes us acceptable to God is not his external declarationof justification, but hisinternal work of renovation within our hearts and lives...
The bellwether test as to where a person stands on this issue is what he or she does with Romans 7, particularly passages such as, "For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (vv. 19, 24). Often, those who are not grounded in the Reformation say that this was Paul's experience before he met the Lord. Those of us from a Reformation perspective, however, would probably say there is no better description of the Christian life in the entire Bible than Romans 7. The reformers really believed that the Christian life was a matter of being simul iustus et peccator-simultaneously justified and sinful-and that we would remain in this tension until death.
Any righteousness that we have, even in the Christian life, is a gift to us. It is not the result of our obedience, of our claiming God's promises, of our "victorious Christian living," or of our "letting go and letting God"... Instead, there must be a clear and unqualified pronouncement of the assurance of salvation on the basis of the fullness of the atonement of Christ.
Francis Schaeffer, in one of my all-time favorite books, True Spirituality, says:
“I'm convinced…that this is when we begin to make our forward steps as Christians: When I know through experience that I can lay hold of Christ's blood by faith to cover my sins this morning, and then to cover my sins this afternoon, even if they're the same sins—when I know this, the preciousness of Christ's blood becomes a tremendous reality, I begin to live in the light of His presence and in the light of His work—not just in the past or in the future, but in the present.”
This is what it means to live by faith. This is what it means to make progress in the Christian life as a disciple of Jesus.
