The teacher in me wants to review everything, and it is the season for looking back and looking forward. I am always looking for spiritual insights and breakthroughs in understanding grace and living in the light of God’s love for us, so this is how I look at the past year. Here are my favorite posts from the past year:
Come Now, and Let us Reason Together An extremely strong example of grace in the Old Testament. It works to take the time to reason through this one verse word by word, slowly.
Temptation, Desire, Predestination, and Grace – OH MY! The nature of temptation as a very strong clue to the nature of grace. This was a breakthrough insight for me.
Faith as the Hinge of All History I love this one because it shows that the revelation of the exact nature of the propitiation, Christ’s death for us, was concealed even from the angels and the major figures in history, until Christ came, and the church was born when Peter first expressed true faith.
The Fear of God and the Love of God An idea about how to understand the fear of God in light of grace.
Praxis Born of Love This has become a very huge theme for me. Grace calls to our love, not our guilt, and love labors with joy, not as work. Thus the importance in our walk with God of play and fellowship and banqueting and such. Belief and heartfelt love lead our praxis, and not the other way around.
Predestination Pillow Talk Predestination is not about time, it is about love.
There was actually a lot of insight about the Church as a gift culture and the profound currency of gratitude under grace:
Gratitude is a profound and sophisticated act
The Church as Gift Culture
The Inward Mentality of the Gift Culture
Work Out Your Salvation with Fear My favorite and breakthrough insight on the nature of the fear of God and how it works under grace. I found this truth incredibly liberating personally.
The nature of personal identity in Christ was a theme this year – if we die, and it is no longer I who live, what does that mean exactly?
The Nature of Personal Identity in Christ
Hell and Grace My orthogonal response to Rob Bell, but more importantly, how to understand how belief in hell works in relation to grace.
Maybe in Christ we are absolutely accepted I’ve been using this idea a lot – what if the gospel of Christ and Him crucified for us is really actually true. Perhaps putting it as an experimental thought process allows us to look at the radical nature of the gospel without being so threatened.
Coercion and true virtue I think this was the breakthrough insight of the year for me. The law amounts to an insurmountable barrier to true virtue, because it can only expect adherence to virtue by threat. Grace opens the possibility to virtue which is truly chosen from the heart, by real desire, and this is only possible if all threat of punishment has been removed. Radical grace is our only hope of true virtue.
There were many more, but these were a few of my very favorites. Onward and upward in His grace!!!