I never had an intellectual struggle with the Bible, with the gospel, with the claims of Christ.
— Tullian Tchividjian
Justification and sanctification are both God's work, and while they can and must be distinguished, the Bible won't let us separate them. Both are gifts of our union with Christ, and within this double-blessing, justification is the root of sanctification and sanctification is the fruit of justification.
Hollywood is not known as a culture of grace. Dog-eat-dog is more like it. People love you one day and hate you the next. Personal value is very much attached to box office revenues and the unpredictable and often cruel winds of fashion.
My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace.
Performancism is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly with our performance and accomplishments.
The Bible is plain that God requires moral perfection. It tells us unambiguously that God is holy and therefore cannot tolerate any hint of unholiness.
As Luke 24 shows, it's possible to read the Bible, study the Bible, and memorize large portions of the Bible, while missing the whole point of the Bible.
I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand why some Christians get mad when we say that the ultimate hero in the Bible is not Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, etc... but Jesus.
When everyone in the world spoke the same language, God came down in judgment, breaking the world apart. But at just the right time, he came down again, this time to reconcile that sinful world to himself.
When you don't have anything to lose, you discover something wonderful: you're free to take great risks without fear or reservation.
The gospel announces that God doesn't relate to us based on our feats for Jesus, but Jesus' feats for us.
I ended up dropping out of high school at 16 and getting kicked out of my home. My parents told me, sadly, that because I was so disruptive to the rest of the household, that I could no longer live under their roof.
Whether this was explicitly taught or implicitly caught, I grew up with the impression that when it comes to the Christian life, justification was step one and sanctification was step two and that once we get to step two there's no reason to revisit step one.
Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ's accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his victory, not yours.
Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.
Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.
If we read the Bible asking first, 'What would Jesus do?' instead of asking 'What has Jesus done,' we'll miss the good news that alone can set us free.
We often read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our triumph, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness.
There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.
An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion.
The gospel alone liberates you to live a life of scandalous generosity, unrestrained sacrifice, uncommon valor, and unbounded courage.
Passive righteousness tells us that God does not need our good works. Active righteousness tells us that our neighbor does. The aim and direction of good works are horizontal, not vertical.
When we imply that our works are for God and not our neighbor, we perpetuate the idea that God's love for us is dependent on what we do instead of on what Christ has done.
I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.
Don't get me wrong - what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.
Our assurance is anchored in the love and grace of God expressed in the glorious exchange: our sin for His righteousness.
Contrary to popular assumptions, the Bible is not a record of the blessed good, but rather the blessed bad. That's not a typo. The Bible is a record of the blessed bad. The Bible is not a witness to the best people making it up to God; it's a witness to God making it down to the worst people.
There is a strange impulse in many to protect Bible characters and to use them as inspiration... as if sanctification happens as a result of emulation.
God loves us too much to leave us in the hell of unhappiness that comes from trying to do his job. Into the slavish misery of our ladder-defined lives, God condescends.
The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.
Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life doesn't have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves, validate ourselves.
