Hole In Our Gospel Quotes

We must move beyond an anemic view of our faith as something only personal and private, with no public dimension, and instead see it as the source of power that can change the world.

What has God given you? Moses had a stick, David had a slingshot, and Paul had a pen. Mother Teresa possessed a love for the poor; Billy Graham, a gift for preaching; and Joni Eareckson Tada, a disability. What did they have in common? A willingness to let God use whatever they had, even when it didn't seem very useful. If you will assess what you have to offer in terms of your time, your treasure, and your talents, you will have a better understanding of how you might uniquely serve.

A church that's lost it's voice for justice is a church that's lost it's relevance in the world.

For I was hungry, while you had all you needed. I was thirsty, but you drank bottled water. I was a stranger, and you wanted me deported. I needed clothes, but you needed more clothes. I was sick, and you pointed out the behaviors that led to my sickness. I was in prison, and you said I was getting what I deserved. (RESV - Richard E. Stearns Version)

It sounds really spiritual to say God is interested in a relationship, not in rules. But it's not biblical. From top to bottom, the Bible is full of commands. They aren't meant to stifle a relationship with God, but to protect it, seal it, and define it. Never forget: first God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, then He gave them the law. God's people were not redeemed by observing the law. But they were redeemed so that they might obey the law.

God never asks us to give what we do not have . . . But he cannot use what we will not give.

Legalism is a problem in the church, but so is anti-nomianism. Granted, I don't hear anyone saying, 'Let's continue in sin that grace may abound'. That's the worse form of antinomianism. But strictly speaking, antinomianism simply means no-law, and some Christians have very little place for the law in their pursuit of holiness.

It sounds really spiritual to say God is interested in a relationship, not in rules. But it’s not biblical. From top to bottom the Bible is full of commands. They aren’t meant to stifle a relationship with God, but to protect it, seal it, and define it.

It’s not what you believe that counts; it’s what you believe enough to do.

No matter how goofy or insignificant your church may seem, fellowship in that body of believers is fellowship with God.

There is an eternal difference between regret and repentance. Regret feels bad about past sins. Repentance turns away from past sins. Regret looks to our own circumstances. Repentance looks to God. Most of us are content with regret. We just want to feel bad for awhile, have a good cry, enjoy the cathartic experience, bewail our sin, and talk about how sorry we are. But we don’t want to change. We don’t want to deal with God.

You can’t make sense of the Bible without understanding that God is holy and that this holy God is intent on making a holy people to live with him forever in a holy heaven.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Good works should always be rooted in the good news

Christians often equate holiness with activism and spiritual disciplines. And while it's true that activism is often the outgrowth of holiness and spiritual disciplines are necessary for the cultivation of holiness, the pattern of piety in the Scripture is more explicitly about our character. We put off sin and put on righteousness. We put to death the deeds of the flesh and put on Christ. To use the older language, we pursue mortification of the old man and the vivification of the new.

It’s true that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1), but this does not mean God will condone all our thoughts and behaviors. Though in Christ he overlooks our sins in a judicial sense, he is not blind to them.

Christ justifies no one whom he does not also sanctify.

God’s love was intended to be demonstrated, not dictated.

I tell my congregation at times, “You don’t have to feel conviction for every sermon. Some of you are actually obedient and faithful in this area.” Not perfectly, of course, but truly and sincerely.

Christ has no body on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion for the world is to look out; yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now. —SAINT TERESA OF AVILA

Some Christians make the mistake of pitting love against law, as if the two were mutually exclusive. You either have a religion of love or a religion of law. But such an equation is profoundly unbiblical.

The world' is not another way of saying 'the people around us'. The world is everything that opposes the will of God. To put it another way, worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal, and righteousness look strange. In every society there is a principle of Babylon that makes war agains the children of God.

Some of us fall through the unseen cracks in the world of health on a bright summer’s day through a run-in with machine or microbe, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Some of us were born this way. And some find out that our genes have hidden within them a ticking time bomb. Waiting. Silently. However we got here, we are now inhabitants of the state of sickness. Our papers for the world of health have been rescinded without notice. Our body-world has been colonised by patriarchs, and we, the natives, should know our place: small folded patient, compliant, silent, not defiant. They seem to believe that our bodies are just an errant version of theirs. That our souls are not woman-shaped on the inside. That it’s not our place to take our space and insist on our inner difference. Their gospel is scribbled down on prescription pads in spider scrawl. They are not to be questioned, especially not with our own heresy.

And it requires that we make some uncomfortable confessions. G.K. Chesterton said, "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." I believe this statement can be applied to the lack of reconciliation within the Church today. We've not been able to arrive at the solution because we haven't seen or acknowledged the problem. The problem is that there is a gaping hole in our gospel. We have preached a gospel that leaves us believing that we can be reconciled to God but not reconciled to our Christian brothers and sisters who don't look like us - brothers and sisters with whom we are, in fact, one blood.

The man who attempts Christianity without the church shoots himself in the foot, shoots his children in the leg, and shoots his grandchildren in the heart.

The whole of the Christian life, from election to justification to sanctification to final glorification, is made possible by and is an expression of our union with Christ.

when it comes to sanctification, it’s more important where you’re going than where you are.

The best-looking Christian is the one growing by the Spirit into the likeness of Christ.

Christian spirituality does not rest on mysticism; it rests in a Mediator.

We usually think of law leading us to gospel. And this is true—we see God’s standards, see our sin, and then see our need for a Savior. But it’s just as true that gospel leads to law. In Exodus, first God delivered his people from Egypt, then he gave the Ten Commandments. In Romans, Paul expounds on the sovereign free grace and the atoning work of Christ in chapters 1–11, and then in chapters 12–16 he shows us how to live in light of these mercies.

But I want to be clear that this does not mean we are saved by piling up enough good works to satisfy God. No, it means that any authentic and genuine commitment to Christ will be accompanied by demonstrable evidence of a transformed life.

It may sound boring or out-of-date, but it just happens to be true: the way to grow in your relationship with Jesus is to pray, read your Bible, and go to a church where you’ll get good preaching, good fellowship, and receive the sacraments.

We usually think of law leading us to gospel. And this is true- we see God's standards, see our sin, and then see our need for a Savior. But it's just as true that gospel leads to law... the good news of the gospel leads to gracious instructions for obeying God.

Saint Francis of Assisi understood the power of faith put into action to change the human heart, for it was he who said, “Preach the gospel always; when necessary use words.” We had not yet spoken a word in their language, but the village elders had already “heard” the gospel.

Any gospel which purports to save people without also transforming them is inviting easy-believism. If you think being a Christian is nothing more than saying a prayer or joining a church, then you’ve confused real grace with cheap grace. Those who are justified will be sanctified.

Do you know why so many Christians are caving on the issue of homosexuality? Certainly cultural pressure plays a big role. But our failure to really understand the holiness of heaven is another significant factor. If heaven is a place of universal acceptance for all pretty nice people, why should anyone make a big deal about homosexuality here on earth? Many Christians have never been taught that sorcerers and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood will be left outside the gates of heaven (Rev. 22:15). So they do not have the guts (or the compassion) to say that the unrepentantly sexually immoral will not be welcomed in either, which is exactly what Revelation 21–22 teaches. Because God’s new world is free from every stain or hint of sin, it’s hard to imagine how we could enjoy heaven without holiness. As J. C. Ryle reminds us, heaven is a holy place. The Lord of heaven is a holy God. The angels are holy creatures. The inhabitants are holy saints. Holiness is written on everything in heaven. And nothing unholy can enter into this heaven (Rev. 21:27; Heb. 12:14). Even if you could enter heaven without holiness, what would you do? What joy would you feel there? What holy man or woman of God would you sit down with for fellowship? Their pleasures are not your pleasures. Their character is not your character. What they love, you do not love. If you dislike a holy God now, why would you want to be with him forever? If worship does not capture your attention at present, what makes you think it will thrill you in some heavenly future? If ungodliness is your delight here on earth, what will please you in heaven, where all is clean and pure? You would not be happy there if you are not holy here.6 Or as Spurgeon put it, “Sooner could a fish live upon a tree than the wicked in Paradise.”7

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairy-tale. So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle three notches one night to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

Our Christian habit is to bewail the world's deteriorating standards with an air of rather self-righteous dismay. We criticize its violence, dishonesty, immorality, disregard for human life, and materialistic greed. "The world is going down the drain," we say with a shrug. But whose fault is it? Who is to blame? Let me put it like this. If the house is dark when nightfall comes, there is no sense in blaming the house; that is what happens when the sun goes down. The question to ask is "Where is the light?" Similarly, if the meat goes bad and becomes inedible, there is no sense in blaming the meat; that is what happens when bacteria are left alone to breed. The question to ask is "Where is the salt?" Just so, if society deteriorates and its standards decline until it becomes like a dark night or a stinking fish, there is no sense in blaming society; that is what happens when fallen men and women are left to themselves, and human selfishness is unchecked. The question to ask is "Where is the Church? Why are the salt and light of Jesus Christ not permeating and changing our society?" It is sheer hypocrisy on our part to raise our eyebrows, shrug our shoulders, or wring our hands. The Lord Jesus told us to be the world's salt and light. If therefore darkness and rottenness abound, it is largely our fault and we must accept the blame.--John Stott (Human Rights and Human Wrongs)

To be saved by the Spirit’s converting grace, sealed by the Spirit’s absolute guarantee, and sanctified by the Spirit’s indwelling power—that’s what it means to be spiritual.

worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.

Defeatist Christians who do not fight against sins because they figure they were “born this way” or “will never change” or “don’t have enough faith” are not being humble. They dishonor the Holy Spirit who strengthens us with supernatural power.

If the possibility of holiness is so plain in the Bible, why do we find it so hard to believe? Probably the biggest reason is because we equate obedience with perfection. If walking in a worthy manner means I never lose my temper, I never lust, I am never lazy, and I never do any good thing with mixed motives, well then of course holiness is impossible. Likewise, if God-pleasing holiness means I have to be filled to the brim with every virtue, without any room for improvement, I’m wasting my time even attempting to be holy. Expecting perfection from ourselves or others is not what holiness is about.

God not only works obedience in us by his grace, it’s also by his grace that our imperfect obedience is acceptable in his sight.

Faith and good works are both necessary. But one is the root and the other the fruit.

The faith that joins you to Christ and makes you right with God is a faith that works itself out in love (Gal. 5:6). On the last day, God will not acquit us because our good works were good enough, but he will look for evidence that our good confession was not phony. It’s in this sense that we must be holy.

the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.6 It sure feels like Ms. Quindlen is giving my little internal timpani a lot of credit. What if your timpani is homophobic, xenophobic, racist, and sexist? Or can all vice simply be attributed to our love of lockstep—you know, all the bad people follow the crowd and all the good people do their own thing? And what if you follow Quindlen’s advice and reject her list of bigotries? Does that make you another lockstep loser? Can you listen to your timpani and the graduation speaker at the same time? I suppose it’s the central creed of postmodernism that you can march to the beat of your own drummer as long as it beats in time with mine.

To even be Christians, we must first believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. That in itself is no small idea. If it is true, it changes everything because if Christ is God, then all that he said and did is deeply significant to how we live our lives. So we believe. But God expects more.

We’ve been told there is a good person in all of us. We’ve been shown in a thousand movies that the purpose of life is to find the real you. We’ve learned from countless television shows that the highest calling is to believe in yourself. The world most definitely insists on holiness. Don’t let anyone tell you it doesn’t. But the world’s holiness is not found in being true to God; it’s found in being true to yourself. And being true to yourself invariably means being true to someone else’s definition of tolerance and diversity.

When was the last time we took a verse like, “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving” (Eph. 5:4) and even began to try to apply this to our conversation, our movies, our YouTube clips, our television and commercial intake? What does it mean that there must not be even a hint of immorality among the saints (v. 3)? It must mean something. In our sex-saturated culture, I would be surprised if there were not at least a few hints of immorality in our texts and tweets and inside jokes. And what about our clothes, our music, our flirting, and the way we talk about people who aren’t in the room?

if the Holy One of Israel is in the business of making a holy people for himself—then why does it seem unlikely that any of us are part of a denomination or ministry network or affiliation of friends that has recently been described as any kind of “holiness movement”? Remember, the Puritans (pure-itans) did not invent that name for themselves. Their opponents coined the term because they thought the Puritans were so intensely focused on being, well, pure. The pursuit of holiness does not occupy the place in our hearts that it did in theirs. More critically, a concern for holiness is not obvious in our lives like it’s obvious in the pages of Scripture.

There is a gap between our love for the gospel and our love for godliness. This must change. It’s not pietism, legalism, or fundamentalism to take holiness seriously. It’s the way of all those who have been called to a holy calling by a holy God.

you were dead in your sins and trespasses (Eph. 2:1). As a descendent of the first man, Adam, you share in the guilt and corruption of his, the first sin (Rom. 5:12–21). You were an enemy of God (v. 10), a sinner brought forth in iniquity (Ps. 51:5), by nature deserving of wrath (Eph. 2:3). You were a sinner who sinned and deserved to die (Rom. 6:23). But here’s the good news for every Christian reading this book: the Bible says that, at just the right time, Jesus Christ died for you (5:8). The Good Shepherd laid down his life for his sheep (John 10:15). Jesus drank the cup of God’s wrath for you (see Mark 10:45). His death on the cross means God is now for you instead of against you (Rom. 3:25; 8:31–39). By faith, through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, you are a reconciled, justified, adopted child of God. What good news!

The reason for your entire salvation, the design behind your deliverance, the purpose for which God chose you in the first place is holiness.

stressing the necessity of personal holiness should not undermine in any way our confidence in justification by faith alone. The best theologians and the best theological statements have always emphasized the scandalous nature of gospel grace and the indispensable need for personal holiness. Faith and good works are both necessary. But one is the root and the other the fruit. God declares us just solely on account of the righteousness of Christ credited (imputed) to us (2 Cor. 5:21). Our innocence in God’s sight is in no way grounded in works of love or acts of charity. Whereas a Catholic might answer the question “What must I do to be saved?” by saying, “Repent, believe, and live in charity,”7 the apostle Paul answers the same exact question with, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31). Getting right with God is entirely and only dependent upon faith.8

In Christ every believer has a once-for-all positional holiness, and from this new identity every Christian is commanded to grow in the ongoing-for-your-whole-life process of holiness (Phil. 2:12–13). As David Peterson puts it, “Believers are definitively consecrated to God in order to live dedicated and holy lives, to his glory.”4 In other words, sanctified is what we are and what we must become.

you end up feeling successful at sanctification because you stayed away from drugs, lost weight, served at the soup kitchen, and renounced Styrofoam. But you’ve ignored gentleness, humility, joy, and sexual purity. God has not really gotten to your heart.

Never forget: first God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, then he gave them the law. God’s people were not redeemed by observing the law, but they were redeemed so they might obey the law. “By this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments” (1 John 2:3). We can talk all day long about our love for God, but if we do not keep his commandments we are liars and the truth is not in us (v. 4).

The Great Commission is about holiness. God wants the world to know Jesus, believe in Jesus, and obey Jesus. We don’t take the Great Commission seriously if we don’t help each other grow in obedience.

Perhaps we are slow to see any good in us because we don’t understand how bad we were. Your tiny spiritual life may seem less negligible when you consider that it comes from a heart that used to be spiritually dead.

Related to this first reason is the fear that a passion for holiness makes you some kind of weird holdover from a bygone era. As soon as you share your concern about swearing or about avoiding certain movies or about modesty or sexual purity or self-control or just plain godliness, people look at you like you have a moralistic dab of cream cheese on your face from the 1950s. Believers get nervous that their friends will call them legalistic, prudish, narrow-minded, old fashioned, holier-than-thou—or worst of all, a fundamentalist.

Holiness is not ultimately about living up to a moral standard. It’s about living in Christ and living out of our real, vital union with him.

Apart from our union with Christ every effort to imitate Christ, no matter how noble and inspired at the outset, inevitably leads to legalism and spiritual defeat. But once you understand the doctrine of union with Christ, you see that God doesn’t ask us to attain to what we’re not. He only calls us to accomplish what already is. The pursuit of holiness is not a quixotic effort to do just what Jesus did. It’s the fight to live out the life that has already been made alive in Christ.

Christians work—they work to kill sin and they work to live in the Spirit. They have rest in the gospel, but never rest in their battle against the flesh and the devil. The child of God has two great marks about him: he is known for his inner warfare and his inner peace.

Is obedience what your church is known for? Is it what other Christians think of when they look at your life? Is this even what you would want to be known for? “Creativity” or “relevance” or “world-changer” might sound better than boring old obedience.

If you dislike a holy God now, why would you want to be with him forever? If worship does not capture your attention at present, what makes you think it will thrill you in some heavenly future? If ungodliness is your delight here on earth, what will please you in heaven, where all is clean and pure? You would not be happy there if you are not holy here.

Passionate exhortation to pursue gospel-driven holiness is barely heard in most of our churches. It’s not that we don’t talk about sin or encourage decent behavior. Too many sermons are basically self-help seminars on becoming a better you. That’s moralism, and it’s not helpful. Any gospel which says only what you must do and never announces what Christ has done is no gospel at all.

There is no righteousness that makes us right with God except for the righteousness of Christ. But for those who have been made right with God by grace alone through faith alone and therefore have been adopted into God’s family, many of our righteous deeds are not only not filthy in God’s eyes, they are exceedingly sweet, precious, and pleasing to him.

All our sins are offensive to God and require forgiveness. But over and over the Bible teaches that some sins are worse than others.

When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we’ve cheapened God’s goodness. If our own legal system does not treat all infractions in the same way, surely God knows that some sins are more heinous than others. If we can spot the difference, we’ll be especially eager to put to death those sins which are most offensive to God.

Through faith we are joined to Christ and have union with him. That bond is unbreakable. Our union with Christ is an established fact, guaranteed for all eternity by the indwelling of the Spirit. When we sin, our union with Christ is not in jeopardy. But our communion is. It is possible for believers to have more or less of God’s favor.

No matter what you profess, if you show disregard for Christ by giving yourself over to sin—impenitently and habitually—then heaven is not your home.

The pursuit of holiness is not a quixotic effort to do just what Jesus did. It’s the fight to live out the life that has already been made alive in Christ.

It’s one thing to be humble about our piety. It’s another to think piety is impossible. The truth is God’s people can be righteous—not perfectly, but truly, and in a way that genuinely pleases God.

Let us say with Paul, “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).

the greatest need of my people is my own holiness.

Christlikeness is possible, but not by merely working with Jesus or simply imitating his example. Only by knowing our position in Jesus can we begin to live like Jesus.

We think relevance and relate-ability are the secrets to spiritual success. And yet, in truth, a dying world needs you to be with God more than it needs you to be “with it.

Paul tells us: “because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction” (1 Thessalonians 1:4 – 5). The gospel they believed and received wasn’t just a theological construct or a churchy platitude. Sure, it came through spoken and written words, and it was preached, taught, and shared. But it also came in power. Often Christians are either “word” people or “power” people. On the one hand, we may lean toward a rationalized Christianity. This type of Christianity holds to the gospel Word without gospel power. It preaches, teaches, catechizes, studies, memorizes, and shares the word but with little effect. It possesses “wise and persuasive words” but not “demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4). This kind of Christianity can master systematic, biblical, and historical theology without being mastered by Christ. It can identify idols but remains powerless to address their power. Why? Because it replaces the power of the Spirit with the power of knowledge. On the other hand, there is an equal danger in spiritualized Christianity. Such Christianity prays, sings, shouts, and claims victory over a lost world without lifting a finger to share God’s gospel. It is not enough to pray for power; we must proclaim God’s Word. The power of the Spirit works through the proclaimed Word. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. My pastor during college, Tom Nelson, always said: “Don’t just stand on a shovel and pray for a hole.” Spiritualized Christianity tends to stand and pray, emphasizing private or emotional experiences with God. What we need is prayer and proclamation, power and Word. The Thessalonians had word and power, they grew in understanding and experience, but they also had full conviction. It is not enough to have spiritual power and good theology. These must also be coupled with faith, an active embrace of God’s promises in Christ, which brings about conviction. Full conviction comes when we are set free from false forms of security and experience Spirit-empowered faith in the word of Christ. It springs from genuine encounter with Christ. Full conviction transcends intellectual doubt and emotional experiences, and in the silence of persecution it says: “Christ is enough.” True security, deep security, comes through the reasonable, powerful, Christ-centered conviction that Jesus is enough, not only for us but for the world. When we falter, the church is present to exhort, encourage, and pray for one another to set apart Christ as Lord in our hearts. May we toss out the penny stocks of the fear of man to invest deeply in the limitless riches of Christ.

Any gospel which says only what you must do and never announces what Christ has done is no gospel at all.

We simply don’t believe that friendship with the world is enmity with God (James 4:4). Many Christians have the mistaken notion that if only we were better Christians, everyone would appreciate us. They don’t realize that holiness comes with a cost. Sure, you can focus on the virtues the world likes. But if you pursue true religion that cares for orphans and promotes purity (James 1:27), you’ll lose some of the friends you were so desperate to make. Becoming a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, requires you to resist the world which wants to press you into its mold (Rom. 12:1–2). Saving yourself for marriage, staying sober on Friday night, turning down a promotion to stay at your church, refusing to say the f-word, turning off the television—these are the kinds of things the world doesn’t understand. Don’t expect them to. The world provides no cheerleaders on the pathway to godliness. THE

The law can, and should, be urged upon true believers—not to condemn, but to correct and to promote Christlikeness.

Both the indicatives of Scripture and the imperatives are from God, for our good, and given in grace.

They’ve willingly embraced Christian freedom but without an equal pursuit of Christian virtue. Among

Good works should always be rooted in the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection, but I believe we are expecting too much from the “flow” and not doing enough to teach that obedience to the law—from a willing spirit, as made possible by the Holy Spirit—is the proper response to free grace. For

Then there’s the reality that holiness is plain hard work, and we’re often lazy. We like our sins, and dying to them is painful. Almost everything is easier than growing in godliness. So we try and fail, try and fail, and then give up. It’s easier to sign a petition protesting man’s inhumanity to man than to love your neighbor as yourself. It’s one thing to graduate from college ready to change the world. It’s another to be resolute in praying

Christians often speak of the three uses of the law. The first is to lead us to Christ by convicting us of sin. The second is to restrain wickedness in the world. The third use is to help us learn the nature of the Lord’s will, acting as a kind of blueprint for holiness.

The Christian life still entails obedience. It still involves a fight. But it’s a fight we will win. You have the Spirit of Christ in your corner, rubbing your shoulders, holding the bucket, putting his arm around you and saying before the next round with sin, “You’re going to knock him out, kid.” Sin may get in some good jabs. It may clean your clock once in a while. It may bring you to your knees. But if you are in Christ it will never knock you out. You are no longer a slave, but free. Sin has no dominion over you. It can’t. It won’t. A new King sits on the throne. You serve a different Master. You salute a different Lord.

The problem is that there is a gaping hole in our gospel. We have preached a gospel that leaves us believing that we can be reconciled to God but not reconciled to our Christian brothers and sisters who don’t look like us—brothers and sisters with whom we are, in fact, one blood.

it also signified the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. This

The year of Jubilee was God’s way of protecting against the rich getting too rich and the poor getting too poor.

The world stands for everything that opposes the will of God.

John Calvin writes, in one of the best paragraphs you’ll ever read, “We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ [Acts 4:12]. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is ‘of him’ [1 Cor. 1:30]. If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. For by his birth he was made like us in all respects [Heb. 2:17] that he might learn to feel our pain [cf. Heb. 5:2]. If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross [Gal. 3:13]; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given to him to judge. In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain and from no other” (Institutes 2.16.19). 2Institutes 3.2.24.

Let’s not make the mistake of the old Keswick theology with its “let go and let God” view of sanctification.14 In The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (an unfortunate classic from the Higher Life movement), Hannah Whitall Smith argues, “All that we claim then in this life of sanctification is that by a step of faith we put ourselves into the hands of the Lord, for Him to work in us all the good pleasure of His will; and that by a continuous exercise of faith we keep ourselves there. . . . Our part is trusting, it is His to accomplish the results.”15 This may sound super-spiritual, but it’s not biblical. Sanctification is not by surrender, but by divinely enabled toil and effort. Listen to Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The New Testament calls upon us to take action; it does not tell us that the work of sanctification is going to be done for us. . . . We are in the ‘good fight of faith’, and we have to do the fighting. But, thank God, we are enabled to do it; for the moment we believe, and are justified by faith, and are born again of the Spirit of God, we have the ability. So the New Testament method of sanctification is to remind us of that; and having reminded us of it, it says, ‘Now then, go and do it’.

If I had to summarize New Testament ethics in one sentence, here’s how I would put it: be who you are. That may sound strange, almost heretical, given our culture’s emphasis on being true to yourself. But like so many of the worst errors in the world, this one represents a truth powerfully perverted. When people say, “Relax, you were born that way,” or “Quit trying to be something you’re not and just be the real you,” they are stumbling upon something very biblical. God does want you to be the real you. He does want you to be true to yourself. But the “you” he’s talking about is the “you” that you are by grace, not by nature. You may want to read through that last sentence again because the difference between living in sin and living in righteousness depends on getting that sentence right. God doesn’t say, “Relax, you were born this way.” But he does say, “Good news, you were reborn another way.

To summarize, then, the Spirit is a light to us in three ways. (1) He exposes sin so that we can recognize it and turn away. (2) He illumines the Word so that we can understand its meaning and grasp its implications. (3) He takes the veil away so that we can see the glory of Christ and become what we behold. Or to put it another way, the Spirit sanctifies by revealing sin, revealing truth, and revealing glory. When we close our eyes to this light, the Bible calls it resisting the Spirit (Acts 7:51), or quenching (1 Thess. 5:19) or grieving the Spirit (Eph. 4:30). There may be slight nuances among the three terms, but they all speak of situations where we do not accept the Spirit’s sanctifying work in our lives. If we give in to sin or give up on righteousness, the fault is not with the Spirit’s power but with our preference for the darkness of evil rather than the Spirit’s light (John 3:19–20).

Holiness is the sum of a million little things—the avoidance of little evils and little foibles, the setting aside of little bits of worldliness and little acts of compromise, the putting to death of little inconsistencies and little indiscretions, the attention to little duties and little dealings, the hard work of little self-denials and little self-restraints, the cultivation of little benevolences and little forbearances. Are you trustworthy? Are you kind? Are you patient? Are you joyful? Do you love? These qualities, worked out in all the little things of life, determine whether you are blight or blessing to everyone around you,

Those serious about communing with Christ will be diligent to share in fellowship with other Christians (Acts 2:42; Heb. 10:24–25). In more than a decade of pastoral ministry I’ve never met a Christian who was healthier, more mature, and more active in ministry by being apart from the church. But I have found the opposite to be invariably true. The weakest Christians are those least connected to the body.

John Calvin writes, in one of the best paragraphs you’ll ever read, “We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ [Acts 4:12]. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is ‘of him’ [1 Cor. 1:30]. If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. For by his birth he was made like us in all respects [Heb. 2:17] that he might learn to feel our pain [cf. Heb. 5:2]. If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross [Gal. 3:13]; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given to him to judge. In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain and from no other” (Institutes 2.16.19).

If we are to be passionate in our pursuit of personal holiness, the first thing we must establish is that holiness is possible. It sounds humble to say, “I cannot obey God for one nanosecond in my life,” but it’s not true. Acting like holiness is out of reach for the ordinary Christian doesn’t do justice to the way the Bible speaks about people like Zechariah and Elizabeth, who “were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord” (Luke 1:6). It doesn’t take seriously the Lord’s commendation of Job as “a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil” (Job 1:8). And there’s Paul, who frequently commends his churches and his ministry partners for their obedience and godly example. It sure seems like holiness is a possibility for God’s people.

The whole of the Christian life, from election to justification to sanctification to final glorification, is made possible by and is an expression of our union with Christ.” ― Kevin DeYoung, The Hole in Our Holiness: Filling the Gap between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness