The Gospel Primer Quotes

Preaching the gospel to myself each day mounts a powerful assault against my pride and serves to establish humility in its place. Nothing suffocates my pride more than daily reminders regarding the glory of my God, the gravity of my sins, and the crucifixion of God’s own Son in my place. Also, the gracious love of God, lavished on me because of Christ’s death, is always humbling to remember, especially when viewed against the backdrop of the Hell I deserve.

And the more lovely He appears, the more self fades into the background like a former love interest who can no longer compete for my affections.

However, the gospel changes my view of God’s commandments, in that it helps me to see the heart of the Person from whom those commandments come.

The gospel is true, but it is the Holy Spirit who makes it vivid to the soul.

Preaching the gospel to myself each day nourishes within me a holy brazenness to believe what God says, enjoy what He offers, and do what He commands.

Pride wilts in the atmosphere of the gospel; and the more pride is mortified within me, the less frequent are my moments of sinful contention with God and with others.53

On the most basic levels, I desire fullness, and fleshly lusts seduce me by attaching themselves to this basic desire. They exploit the empty spaces in me, and they promise that fulness will be mine if I give in to their demands. When my soul sits empty and is aching for something to fill it, such deceptive promises are extremely difficult to resist. Consequently, the key to mortifying fleshly lusts is to eliminate the emptiness within me and replace it with fullness; and I accomplish this by feasting on the gospel. Indeed, it is in the gospel that I experience a God who glorifies Himself by filling me with His fullness. . . . This is the God of the gospel, a God who is satisfied with nothing less than my experience of fullness in Him! . . . Indeed, as I perpetually feast on Christ and all His blessings found in the gospel, I find that my hunger for sin diminishes and the lies of lust simply lose their appeal. Hence, to the degree that I am full, I am free. Eyes do not rove, nor do fleshly lusts rule, when the heart is fat with the love of Jesus!

Every time I deliberately disobey a command of God, it is because I am in that moment doubtful as to God’s true intentions in giving me that command. Does He really have my best interests at heart?

What is preaching? It is proclamation, not just moralizing. It is Good News, not just good advice; it is gospel, not just law. Supremely, it is about God and what he has done, not just about us and about what we ought to do.

As long as I am inside the gospel, I experience all the protection I need from the powers of evil that rage against me. It is for this reason that the Bible tells me to “take up”10 and “put on”11 the whole armor of God; and the pieces of armor it tells me to put on are all merely synonyms for the gospel. Translated literally from the Greek, they are: “. . . the salvation . . . the

When I begin my train of thought with the gospel, I realize that if God loved me enough to sacrifice His Son’s life for me, then He must be guided by that same love when He speaks His commandments to me. Viewing God’s commands and prohibitions in this light, I can see them for what they really are: friendly signposts from a heavenly Father who is seeking to love me through each directive, so that I might experience His very fullness forever.20

[T]he gospel is the one great permanent circumstance in which I live and move; and every hardship in my life is allowed by God only because it serves his gospel purposes in me. When I view my circumstances in this light, I realize that the gospel is not just one piece of good news that fits into my life somewhere among all the bad. I realize instead that the gospel makes genuinely good news out of every other aspect of my life, including my severest trials.

To be biblical a sermon must be rooted in the particularities of a passage of Scripture, in the immediate and wider context of the passage and in the cosmic sweep of the Christian gospel as a whole. Only thus can I be sure that I have heard an authentic proclamation of the Word--not just that I have admired the silver-tongued eloquence of the King's herald or even the splendor of his robes, but that I have caught a fresh glimpse of the face of the King himself. The preacher cannot guarantee that this will happen. The preaching event, that moment of royal meeting, is something we cannot create or command. Only God can do that.

It is fatally easy, under the conditions of the modern world, for a writer of genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah. Other writers, indeed, may have had profound insights before him; but we readily believe that everything is relative to its period of society, and that these insights have now lost their validity; a new generation is a new world, so there is always a chance, if not of delivering a wholly new gospel, of delivering one as good as new. Or the messiahship may take the form of revealing for the first time the gospel of some dead sage, which no one has understood before; which owing to the backward and confused state of men's minds has lain unknown to this very moment; or it may even go back to the lost Atlantis and the ineffable wisdom of primitive peoples. A writer who is fired with such a conviction is likely to have some devoted disciples; but for posterity he is liable to become, what he will be for the majority of his contemporaries, merely one among many entertainers. And the pity is that the man may have had something to say of the greatest importance: but to announce, as your own discovery, some truth long known to mankind, is to secure immediate attention at the price of ultimate neglect.

One can detect, therefore, a difference between Luther’s and Calvin’s handling of the law that is almost as much psychological or intuitive as theological. Whereas Luther often sees what the law prohibits, in order to emphasize its role as a ‘killer’ from which one must flee to the grace of the gospel, Calvin looks for what the law promotes, using it as a model or primer that he applies to all kinds of issues of Christian living in the world of his day. When either of these approaches (both of which can claim New Testament precedent) is taken to extremes, they can, of course, become unbalanced in opposite ways. Thus, the danger of Lutheranism is a slide into practical Marcionism or antinomianism, while the danger of Calvinism has always been a slide into legalism. But neither of these extremes can be charged against Luther or Calvin themselves.

Re-preaching the gospel and then showing how it applied to life was Paul’s choice method for ministering to believers, thereby providing a divinely inspired pattern for me to follow when ministering to myself and to other believers.

The more I exult in the reality of my justification in Christ, the more I position myself to experience the full governing force of its sanctifying power in my life.

As I meditate on the gospel each day, I find my thoughts inevitably traveling from the gifts I’ve received to the Giver of those gifts; and the more my thoughts are directed to Him, the more I experience the essence of eternal life.

The gospel is so foolish3 (according to my natural wisdom), so scandalous4 (according to my conscience), and so incredible (according to my timid heart5), that it is a daily battle to believe the full scope of it as I should. There is simply no other way to compete with the forebodings of my conscience, the condemnings of my heart, and the lies of the world and the Devil6 than to overwhelm such things with daily rehearsings of the gospel.

Preaching’ is common, oral, gospel proclamation by the entire church. It is not, and never was, pulpit oratory. In the New Testament, the word ‘preaching’ is almost never used to describe discipleship sermons within the four walls of a building. It is missionary proclamation to lost people out in the world. The audience is generally a group of people who have not been introduced to the Savior.

sanctification’ is merely the lifelong process wherein I joyfully surrender myself to God’s imputed righteousness and then do whatever this righteousness directs me to do.

my justification has something to say to me by way of directing me how to live my life each day. What it directs me to do is to be holy; and what results from my obedience to its rule is sanctification, or holiness of life.

The righteousness of God, credited to me through Christ, is not merely something I rest in, but it is also the premier saving reality by which God governs me. According to Romans 6, when I obeyed the gospel call I was both declared righteous and “became a slave to righteousness” at the same time.

Nonetheless, when I remind myself of my sins against God and of His forgiving and generous grace toward me, I give the gospel an opportunity to reshape my perspective and to put me in a frame of mind wherein I actually desire to give this same grace to those who have wronged me. 14. A Heart

establish humility in its place. Nothing suffocates my pride more than daily reminders regarding the glory of my God, the gravity of my sins, and the crucifixion of God’s own Son in my place. Also, the gracious love of God, lavished on me because of Christ’s death, is always humbling to remember, especially when viewed against the backdrop of the Hell I deserve.

Compared to greater endeavors, self-love is mundane and tiresome. Consequently, the more thoroughly I can be done with such tedium, the freer my soul will be to soar at its God-intended heights.

However, the gospel changes my view of God’s commandments, in that it helps me to see the heart of the Person from whom those commandments come. When I begin my train of thought with the gospel, I realize that if God loved me enough to sacrifice His Son’s life for me, then He must be guided by that same love when He speaks His commandments to me.

The gospel also reminds me that my righteous standing with God always holds firm regardless of my performance, because my standing is based solely on the work of Jesus and not mine.28 On my worst days of sin and failure, the gospel encourages me with God’s unrelenting grace toward me.29 On my best days of victory and usefulness, the gospel keeps me relating to God solely on the basis of Jesus’ righteousness and not mine.

All that I am and all that I have I owe to Him and to His goodness.167 7 My life in every way is, and will continue to be, utterly dependent upon Him in whom I live and move and have my being.

The forgiveness of God, made known to me through the gospel, liberates me from sin’s power because it liberates me first from its guilt;25 and preaching such forgiveness to myself is a practical way of putting the gospel into operation as a nullifier of sin’s power in my life. 9.

When my flesh yearns for some prohibited thing, I must die. When called to do something I don’t want to do, I must die. When I wish to be selfish and serve no one, I must die. When shattered by hardships that I despise, I must die. When wanting to cling to wrongs done against me, I must die. When enticed by allurements of the world, I must die. When wishing to keep besetting sins secret, I must die. When wants that are borderline needs are left unmet, I must die. When dreams that are good seem shoved aside, I must die.

Doing right is not always easy, but it is never more easy than when one is breathing deeply the atmosphere of the gospel.

However, what I could not do, God did180 – and in doing it, He did it all, sending His own Son into the world to die on the cross for my sins,181 thereby showing me unfathomable love.