Category Archives: Quotes & Excerpts

For all you goldfish lovers.

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Since Chris Nye is at a hip and cool conference this week, he won’t have time to tell me not to post his words. Plus, he emailed them to me. Plus plus, below is part of a story about a goldfish.

This Sunday Chris will teach our middle schoolers on the Resurrection of Jesus (John 20:1-23).

Chris wrote a little preview for us:

I can remember when my first goldfish, Bowser, died. I had bought Bowser on sale at the local pet store after begging my dad for 25 cents. He was trying to talk me out of it, telling me that I wouldn’t feed it, that cleaning the bowl would be difficult, but I insisted over and over again that I would take care of him and love him forever.

It would be only three weeks before Bowser died. But I would like to take this time to defend myself: I fed Bowser, I cleaned his bowl, and I even gave him a nice spot in the shade on the counter in the kitchen. Even though I followed all the directions perfectly, Bowser still died.
Continue reading →

 

A transforming moral imperative. (It’s more fun to obey.)

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“Christians today will understand that biblically authentic Christianity is never merely a matter of rules and regulations, of public liturgy and private morality. Biblical Christianity results in transformed men and women—men and women who, because of the power of the Spirit of God, enjoy regenerated natures. We want to please God, we want to be holy, we want to confess Jesus is Lord. In short, because of the grace secured by Christ’s cross, we ourselves experience something of a transforming moral imperative: the sins we once loved we learn to fear and hate, the obedience and holiness we once despised we now hunger for. God help us, we are woefully inconsistent in all this, but we have already tasted enough of the powers of the age to come that we know what a transforming moral imperative feels like in our lives, and we long for its perfection at the final triumph of Christ.
—Don (D.A.) Carson, Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus, pp. 31-32.

 

Worth a read: Counterfeit Gospels.

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The Good News in 3-D:

  1. The Gospel Story // Creation ➙ Fall ➙ Redemption ➙ Restoration (the storyline of Scripture, and of the world)
  2. The Gospel Announcement // Jesus Christ our Substitute, who gave Himself for us in order to bring us to God
  3. The Gospel Community // Jesus purchased a people to embody His message, people who live in a new reality, being zealous for good works, living His life

We need all three to faithfully believe, embody, and proclaim the Good News of Jesus. When we negate one, we have a partial or incomplete gospel, that while perhaps not direct heresy will dissolve the foundation of our hope in Christ. These are ‘counterfeit’ Gospels, where we have tweaked God’s message to soften it and suit our preferences. Just about every time, counterfeit gospels represent either a dilution of the truth or a truth that is out of proportion. Sadly, these watered down versions never satisfy our longings.

Author Trevin Wax summarizes the message of his new book — Counterfeit Gospels: Rediscovering the Good News in a World of False Hope — with a video trailer:

Wax takes aim at these six ‘counterfeit’ gospels Wax in his book (p. 210):

 

Follow along: Holy Week readings.

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Here some helpful tools for tracking the words and works of Holy Week. Spanning from Palm Sunday to Resurrection Sunday (Easter), we see the life of Jesus on display in and around Jerusalem. The plot thickens as His life mission will climax in his agonizing death, leading to His triumphant resurrection. He truly laid death in His grave, conquering all His enemies (sin, death, and Satan). Our hope is in the One who for love gave up His life so we may live. The innocent died in place of the guilty, the just for the unjust, in order to bring us to God (1 Pet. 3:18).

Let us remember the words of our Lord:

“This is why the Father loves me: because I freely lay down my life. And so I am free to take it up again. No one takes it from me. I lay it down of my own free will. I have the right to lay it down; I also have the right to take it up again. I received this authority personally from my Father.”

—John 10:17-18, The Message

See It

Visual graphic of the events of Holy Week on a timeline (via BibleGateway.com). It is a visualization of the ‘Who,’ ‘What,’ and ‘Where’ of Holy Week.

For example, to below is a closeup of the chart showing Jesus in Gethsemane and his betrayal by Judas. First Jesus draws aside Peter, James, and John and entreats them to pray while Jesus also prays. Then Judas and a crowd arrive; Judas betrays Judas with a kiss, Jesus is arrested, and the disciples flee, while Peter and John follow at a distance. The visualization shows you the main actors in the story and provides Bible references for you to read the story yourself.

[click image to enlarge]

Read It

Justin Taylor has attempted harmony/chronology of the words and actions of Jesus in the final week of his pre-resurrection life (with help from the ESV Study Bible). Here are links, organized by day:

 

Download all of the Scriptures above compiled into one PDF document: Holy Week Timeline (37 pages).

Also, see the geography and harmony of Holy Week re-enacted in Google Earth.

Let this week be full of contemplation, and consider the great cost of God the Father crushing God the Son, to reconcile us and the world to Himself.

 

Deo Volente — trust God and do the next thing.

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Deo Volente is Latin for “God willing.” The idea comes from James’ pen:

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
—James 4:13-17

My wife has counseled countless ladies on the simple principle of trusting God and then do the next thing. Obey in the small task or responsibility right in front of you. Especially when confused, depressed, or at a loss of God’s voice. We know His will; it’s what He placed before us. Then He will reveal His heart and will to us more and more, as we joyfully obey from the heart.

[Thanks to a friend for sending me a text, signing off with Deo Volente.
Helped me make sense of God’s will right in front of me.]

 

That’s who I am.

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“[Jesus’] self-awareness is startling. No other human teacher has made anything like the claims he makes. There are plenty who have said, ‘I’m the divine consciousness.’ But they think of the divinity as being in all of us, in the trees and the rocks and the human spirit. Jesus, however, understands that there is a God who is uncreated, beginningless, infinitely transcendent, who made this world, who keeps everything in the universe going, so that all the molecules, all the stars, all the solar systems are being held up by the power of this God. And Jesus says, That’s who I am.“

—Timothy Keller, The King’s Cross, pp. 43-44

 

 

The implications: my death in Him.

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“I wanted to cling to one part of the gospel: His death for me. I don’t want to grapple with the implications of my death in Him. I don’t want to have to wrestle with my doubts about my own resurrection. I just want Him to forgive me, help me, give me heaven on earth. Keep my family safe and healthy, happy and secure. And bless my work for Him. I want life without death.

But Jesus gives life through death.”

—Rick McKinley, A Kingdom Called Desire: Confronted By the Love of a Risen King, p. 53.

 

Conquering Anxiety.

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God will give us what we want. If we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we will get righteousness. But if we want someone else, He will let us pursue it, find it, and become fully consumed with it. That thing will leave us empty in the end. It will leave us anxious.

“Anxiety … is fear and worry about what the future holds … it is being stricken by the unavoidable and the uncontrollable.”

“… Being the captain of your own ship and the master of your destiny means you are going to sail you ship through the waters of anxiety.”

“If you want to be conformed to the image of Christ, you will be. And if you don’t, you won’t.”

—Pastor Jon Furman, “Joy That Overcomes” (series: True Joy, part 10, on Philippians 4:2-9)

The Scripture:

2 Now I appeal to Euodia and Syntyche. Please, because you belong to the Lord, settle your disagreement. 3 And I ask you, my true partner, to help these two women, for they worked hard with me in telling others the Good News. They worked along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are written in the Book of Life.

4 Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again—rejoice! 5 Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do. Remember, the Lord is coming soon.

6 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. 7 Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

8 And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. 9 Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.

—Philippians 4:2-9, NLT

 

8: following in what is fully accomplished.

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Let’s pick up where we left off in Romans 8. I am convinced that if we paused to consider what Jesus has done for us, we would live differently. He has already accomplished all that He calls us to be and do. The Christian life is not about you and what you must do. It is about God and what He has done.

… He did this so that the requirement of the law would be fully accomplished for us who no longer follow our sinful nature but instead follow the Spirit.
—Romans 8:4

Jesus lived a perfect life for us and died a death for us so that everything He told us to do would be considered done. Because of Jesus’ life, God looks at us and says the law is fully accomplished. We can follow the Spirit without the pressure to perform because Jesus has performed perfectly for us. Instead, we are empowered by God’s Spirit to live.

Remember today that you follow the Spirit, and so you have fully met every requirement that God demands.

Of course, many will try to abuse this freedom and inwardly reason “Since Jesus did everything, I don’t have to do anything.” But we who think thus deny the Gospel by our lives, and show the Spirit does not live in us. Jesus told us the SPirit would come and make all that is His become ours; so, to not walk in the pattern of living as Jesus is to reject Him as Lord and Savior. But, to welcome His fully accomplished work for us is to rest and revel in His greatness, goodness, grace, and to rejoice in His glory be shown through our lives. This happens through God’s continual presence, His Spirit in us.

“The Christian is like a man who has the right tune in his head but cannot remember all the words. So when Paul says that love fulfills the law (Romans 13:8; Galatians 5:15), that is not to [declare] that Christians are perfect, but that they live … according to the Spirit.
—James R. Edwards

—Quoted in the Sojourn project, forty: romans eight (to meditate on and memorize Romans 8 over the course of 40 days).

 

8: a different plan in effect.

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The law of Moses could not save us, because of our sinful nature. But God put into effect a different plan to save us. He sent his own Son in a human body like ours, except that ours are sinful. God destroyed sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins.
—Romans 8:3

The law of Moses says, “do this.” The gospel says, “it is done.” God looked at the law and said, “This might be impossible for you, but nothing is impossible for me.” What was impossible through the law God made possible. It’s impossible for us to save ourselves by doing what we’re told because we can’t do what we’re told.

God put into effect a different plan. He made what’s impossible for us possible when He send His own Son to live the life we should have lived, and die the death we should have died. By doing that, God destroyed sin’s control over us.

In this new plan God does for us and in us what we could not do for ourselves, because of the principle that is at work in us: sin and death. When we own up to this reality we are on the road towards recovery.

Christ became our substitute, conquering sin and ultimately death for us, bringing us to God.

“God sent his Son, who took to himself a nature — a body and all the other components of human nature, with one noticeable exception: he did not take to himself sinful human nature. The incarnate Christ has without original sin. Christ came like us, meaning he looked like us, but not with the sin we are born with. If he had come as sinful flesh, he himself would have been a sinner and could not have saved himself, let alone us. God destroyed sin’s control over us. The cross of Christ was where God poured out his judgment upon human sins. Believers’ sins were imputed to Jesus and God condemned them. That is why there is now no condemnation left for anyone who is in Christ, because the condemnation has already taken place on the cross.
—R.C. Sproul

—Quoted in the Sojourn project, forty: romans eight (to meditate on and memorize Romans 8 over the course of 40 days).

 

8: Zilch.

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There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
—Romans 8:1

So now means “now that you are a Christian,” or, “because of all that God has done.” If you are a Christian, if you belong to Christ Jesus, because of all that God has done for you, there is no condemnation for you. No here literally means no, as in nada, zip, zilch. There is no judgment left, no penalty, no fine to be paid. We can kick and scream and feel guilty all we want, but there is no condemnation left for those who belong to Jesus because Jesus has paid for all of it.

Have you trusted in Christ Jesus? Then there is no condemnation left. Today, remind yourself you belong to Christ Jesus.

—Quoted in the Sojourn project, forty: romans eight (to meditate on and memorize Romans 8 over the course of 40 days).

 

8: No condemnation.

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It is the unspeakable privilege of all those that are in Christ Jesus that there is therefore no condemnation to them. He does not say, “there is no accusation against them,” for this there is; but the accusation is thrown out. He does not say, “there is nothing in them that deserves condemnation,” for this there is, and they see it, and own it; but it shall not be their ruin.
—Matthew Henry

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
—Romans 8:1

Quoted in the Sojourn project, forty: romans eight (to meditate on and memorize Romans 8 over the course of 40 days).