So we can stop walking on egg shells wondering if these things are true. Your problem is not that you need to convince God to stop hating you and to start having forgiveness and kindness towards you. You have no idea how high that mountain of majestic kind powerful eternal love for you goes.
15 For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the saints, 16 do not cease giving thanks for you, while making mention of you in my prayers; 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, […]
I read a short devotional from Greg Laurie just now, so I decided to reflect on it. I don’t mean to nitpick. I’ve always heard great things about Greg Laurie. I’m not calling him a heretic or a legalist, I really have no idea. The point is, this post makes what I think is an […]
Real love for one another is found in belief in group redemption and lavish grace. It means thinking, concerning everyone, that Jesus has died for us. He has loved us together and redeemed all of us with His blood. And this becomes the new way of doing community – belief.
You know why Piper has to get so shrill about loving God? Because He paints a God for us who is conditional and weird and hard to love. The joyous news is this: God isn’t like that! He died for us while we were yet sinners! (Romans 5:8)
And so He has lavished grace and eternal mercy on all of us who believe. Our mutual sins are lavishly forgiven as a whole. This works because it really is our trespasses which are the problem. My sins were not born in isolation.
You will never understand the way Christ loved the church if you do not first hear about and believe His love for you. You have to know the love of Christ if you are to give it.
But this is the message of the cross: God took the worst evil and made it into the greatest good. He took the cross of Christ and made it into the salvation of mankind.
So the message is a proclamation of our rescue – “the gospel of your salvation.” It means that you simply wait until it comes to you. The message is not “rescue yourself.” It is “here is your rescue!” And that means, you can’t dress up belief as something more than hearing and saying “that’s right!”
It says that we can rest and we can trust that, without qualifiers, God works everything out according to the counsel of His will. We do not have to worry that somehow we will miss God’s will. We are not the protectors or the progenitors of His will.