from Grace Alone: How the Grace of God Amazes Me

Here's a couple of great quotes from Grace Alone: How the Grace of God Amazes Me by Sinclair B. Ferguson.

Being amazed by God's grace is a sign of spiritual vitality. It is a litmus test of how firm and real is our grasp of the Christian gospel and how close is our walk with Jesus Christ. The growing Christian finds that the grace of God astonishes and amazes.

We do not become sinners by committing specific acts. We commit specific acts of sin because we are sinners. In short, my problem is not the isolated actions that I see as aberrations from what I really am. I am deceiving myself if I think that way. These actions are not aberrations but revelations of what is in my heart. They show that I commit sin because I am in bondage to it.

Here, then, are two sure signs that our religion, even if we call it Christian, is not the real thing. We are not made happy by seeing the grace of God touch the lives of needy men and women so that they are brought to faith in Jesus Christ, and we neither see nor feel any special need for forgiveness for ourselves. We do not see ourselves as "one of nought."

What Christ is doing in you is still incomplete. But in what Jesus Christ has done for you there is not a single tiny crack that the satanic arrows can penetrate.

A World Without Jobs

article from Andy Crouch: A World Without Jobs: The gospel of a secular age

Steve Jobs’s gospel is, in the end, a set of beautifully polished empty promises. But I look on my secular neighbors, millions of them, like sheep without a shepherd, who no longer believe in anything they cannot see, and I cannot help feeling compassion for them, and something like fear. When, not if, Steve Jobs departs the stage, will there be anyone left who can convince them to hope?

Glenn Beck and the Gospel

Interesting article over at Moore to the the Point about Glenn Beck's recent speech.  The best part of the article had little to do with Beck or Mormonism . . . it was a poignant point about American Christianity.

"Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

Leaders will always be tempted to bypass the problem behind the problems: captivity to sin, bondage to the accusations of the demonic powers, the sentence of death. That’s why so many of our Christian superstars smile at crowds of thousands, reassuring them that they don’t like to talk about sin. That’s why other Christian celebrities are seen to be courageous for fighting their culture wars, while they carefully leave out the sins most likely to be endemic to the people paying the bills in their movements." 

Read it all.

Christopher Hitchens and the true nature of Christianity

Christopher Hitchens (a popular atheist or as he prefers "anti-theist") was recently interviewed by Marilyn Sewell (a Unitarian minister).  In that interview there was an interesting exchange about the true nature of Christianity.  And oddly enough, Hitchens got it right!

Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian. (read the entire interview)

Why is Preaching So Important?

from Mark Driscoll's Blog:

There is an ongoing debate as to the purpose of the sermon and whether it should focus on converting the lost or maturing the saved. The apparent conflict between preaching for seekers and preaching for believers is resolved simply by noting that both need to repent of sin and trust in Jesus to live a new life empowered by the Spirit. Therefore, a sermon can and should effectively communicate to both audiences, and it will if the preacher is able to go after the root of sin and explain Christian jargon in order to speak the "tongue" of the hearer. This includes saying the name of Jesus and making him known.