Aggressive response to the Gospel

Matt Chandler:


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.


The Explicit Gospel, (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 217–218.


Citation: <http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/when-grace-goes-violent> Accessed 5/12/12

Tim Keller on the Gospel's particularity

"The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism.  Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles-it is something else altogether. 

The gospel is distinct from the other two approaches: In its view, everyone is wrong, everyone is loved, and everyone is called to recognize this and change."

I appreciate the layered thinking.  I am typically so black and white, that anytime someone gives an alternative to a common  false dilemma , it is helpful.

C.S. Lewis on oranges

C.S. Lewis to a Mrs. Johnson:

"The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination.  Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less heaven."

Reflecting the love of Another

C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, articulates a truth that has been slow to dawn on me.

"The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ life inside him.  He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it."

 The ramifications of this truth has started to cultivate some old, hard ground in my life, and I am starting to see some green sprouts of life popping to the surface.  Delightful to be absorbing some warm rays of His love toward me.  Which is QUITE a different experience than trying to broadcast my own "goodness" toward Him to try and get His attention.

A little truth which is bigger than it first appears

"Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."
-Robert Brault

Ken Myers on C. S. Lewis' views on Presentism

Ken Myers, author of the "Contours of Culture" column in Touchstone magazine, illuminates C. S. Lewis' thinking on "Presentism": 


"Lewis laments the mentality of "Presentism," of provincialism in time, that plagues modern imaginations.  

"How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word 'stagnation,' with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called 'permanence'?...Why does 'latest' in advertisements mean 'best'?" 

"Lewis argued that this preoccupation with the present (and indifference  to or suspicion of the past) was a function of living with so much technology

"I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image.  It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones.  For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is clumsy."

"He went on to argue that our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded - that we should live for the next thing rather than treasure and honor the permanent things - was the single aspect of modern life that detached us most thoroughly from all previous ages of history." (1)


This view is particularly pithy when cross-referenced with a letter I read recently while reading Letters of C. S. Lewis. Lewis is responding to a letter from (I am not making this up) "The Society For The Prevention Of Progress" in May 1944:

"While feeling that I was born a member of your Society, I am nevertheless honoured to receive the outward seal of membership.  I shall hope by continued orthodoxy and the unremitting practice of Reaction, Obstruction, and Stagnation to give you no reason for repenting your favour..." (2)

Citation: 
(1) Myers, Ken. Touchstone Magazine: Contours of Culture, "No Time Like the Present". May/June, 2011.  Volume 24, Number 3. Pages 11, 12.
(2)  Lewis, W. H., Editor. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. New York. 1966. Page 204.

J. I. Packer on the place of the Gospel in our culture

Packer:

Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms.

Our business is to interpret and criticize modern thought by the gospel, not vice versa.

Confusion here is fatal.

--J. I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God (Eerdmans, 1958), 136

Citation: <http://dogmadoxa.blogspot.com/2011/12/our-fundamental-loyalty.html>, Accessed December 21, 2011.