Words of Grace
Below, you will find periodic articles, videos and audio on a variety of topics concerning church life from the staff at Grace.
Words of Grace, 4/27/2012
Fifth Sunday Corporate Prayer Gathering
April 29, 2012
6pm
Fifteen years ago I read the paragraph below. Will God be gracious to give us this gift of revival in our lifetime? This is what we plan to pray for at our next Fifth Sunday Corporate Prayer Gathering. Will you join us?
Scott
“Revival I define as a work of God by his Spirit through his word bringing the spiritually dead to living faith in Christ and renewing the inner life of Christians who have grown slack and sleepy. In revival God makes old things new, giving new power to law and gospel and new spiritual awareness to those whose hearts and consciences had been blind, hard and cold. Revival thus animates or reanimates churches and Christian groups to make a spiritual and moral impact on communities. It comprises an initial reviving, followed by a maintained state of revivedness for as long as the visitation lasts. Taking the early chapters of Acts as a paradigm, and relating them to the rest of the New Testament, which is manifestly a product throughout of revival conditions, we may list as marks of revival an awesome sense of the presence of God and the truth of the gospel; a profound awareness of sin, leading to deep repentance and heartfelt embrace of the glorified, loving, pardoning Christ; an uninhibited witness to the power and glory of Christ, with a mighty freedom of speech expressing a mighty freedom of spirit; joy in the Lord, love for his people, and fear of sinning; and from God’s side an intensifying and speeding-up of the work of grace so that men are struck down by the word and transformed by the Spirit in short order, making it appropriate pastorally as well as theologically to baptize adult converts straight after they have professed faith. It is true, of course, that there can be personal revival without any community movement, and that there can be no community movement save as individuals are revived. Nonetheless, if we follow Acts as our paradigm we shall define revival as an essentially corporate phenomenon in which God sovereignly shows his hand, visits his people, extends his kingdom, and glorifies his name.”
-J.I Packer, A Quest For Godliness
Words of Grace, 4/20/2012
Let’s not move too quickly to a new topic now that Easter Sunday is behind us. The content of many churches has changed in the past two weeks. The resurrection has been replaced by other themes important to our faith. But wait, when I read the Bible, it seems that all the themes of the Christian faith flow from the two-fold salvation event of the cross and resurrection of Jesus.
The resurrection of Jesus led to the founding of the church of Jesus. And the teaching of the church recorded in the New Testament shows us that the resurrection shapes how the church thinks and lives.
The Apostle Peter was a man profoundly impacted by the resurrection. He despaired because he denied Jesus. Jesus died before Peter had the opportunity to be reconciled to him. It was after the resurrection that Jesus showed Peter that he was still loved and that he still had a place in the ongoing work of God. Peter had a new and living hope.
Peter wrote a letter to Christians who were struggling with the hardships of being believers in this world. He told them that they have been born again to a living hope (1 Peter 1:3). What is the living hope? It is hope in the living Christ and his salvation for us. It is hope born in the hearts of people made spiritually alive by God. It is hope that produces a new kind of thinking and living in the world. When God gives us the new birth through the resurrection of Jesus, living hope is born in our hearts.
This living hope resides in the community of Christ known as the church. When we gather together this Sunday as a local congregation we do so with living hope.
Scott
Words of Grace: Tuesday, April 3
Sunday: The Centrality of the Cross
Monday: An Atonement for Sin
A Revelation of Love
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8
How can we believe in the love of God when there appears to be so much evidence to contradict it? The apostle Paul spells out in Romans 5 two major means by which we become sure that God loves us. The first is that he “has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (v. 5). The second is that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (v. 8). How, then, can we doubt God’s love? To be sure, we are often profoundly perplexed by the tragedies of life. But God has both proved his love for us in the death of his Son and poured his love into us by the gift of his Spirit. Objectively in history and subjectively in experience, God has given us good grounds for believing in his love. The integration of the historical ministry of God’s Son (on the cross) with the contemporary ministry of his Spirit (in our hearts) is one of the most wholesome and satisfying features of the gospel.
What the Bible does not solve is the problem of suffering, but it gives us the right perspective from which to view it. Then, whenever we are torn with anguish, we will climb the hill called Calvary and, from that unique vantage ground, survey the calamities of life.
What makes suffering insufferable is not so much the pain involved as the feeling that God doesn’t care. We picture him lounging in a celestial armchair, indifferent to the sufferings of the world. It is this slanderous caricature of God that the cross smashes to smithereens. We are to see him not on a comfortable chair but on a cross. For the God who allows us to suffer once suffered himself in Jesus Christ, and he continues to suffer with us today. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over that mark we boldly stamp another mark—the cross.
For further reading: Romans 8:28-39
John Stott, Through the Bible, Through the Year: Daily Reflections from Genesis to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), p. 267.
Words of Grace: Monday, April 2
Sunday: The Centrality of the Cross
An Atonement for Sin
“For Christ died for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” 1 Peter 3:18
This is one of the great New Testament texts about the cross. It tells us the major reason why Christ died. Now we need to penetrate more deeply into the meaning and purpose of the cross.
Firstly, Christ died to bring us to God. Behind this statement lies the assumption that we are separated from God and need to be brought back to him. And this is so. All our sense of alienation and of homesickness can be traced ultimately to our estrangement from God, and our estrangement is due to our sin. As Isaiah put it, “Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you” (Isa. 59:2). What, then, did Christ do to remedy this situation?
Secondly, Christ died for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous. To understand this, we need to recall that sin and death are riveted to one another from the beginning to the end of the Bible as an offense and its just reward. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). But Jesus committed no sins for which atonement needed to be made. So if he died for sins, it must have been our sins, not his, for which he died. As Peter put it, “He died for sins . . . the righteous for the unrighteous” (1 Pet. 3:18), the innocent for the guilty. It is this that justifies our conviction that Jesus’ death was substitutionary. That is, he died as our substitute. We deserved to die; he died instead. And because he took our place, bore our sin, and died our death, we may be freely forgiven.
Thirdly, Christ died for sins once for all. The adverb hapax (“once”) means not “once upon a time” but “once and for all.” It expresses the absolute finality of what Christ did on the cross. It is because he had paid the full penalty for our sins that he could cry out, “It is finished.” So what is there left for us to do? Nothing! We can contribute nothing to what Christ has done. All we can do is to thank him for what he has done and rest in his finished work.
For further reading: Hebrews 9:23-28
John Stott, Through the Bible, Through the Year: Daily Reflections from Genesis to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), p. 266.
Words of Grace: Sunday, April 1
Congregation,
Join us in private and family devotion as we prepare for public worship on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
This Holy Week, we will let John Stott guide us through the New Testament message of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Each day this week you will receive a Words of Grace email with a devotional reading from Through the Bible, Through The Year, by John Stott. These readings will also be posted on the church website so you can refer back to them at anytime.
May these readings help inform your mind and move your heart with the gospel message that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture, that he was buried, and that he rose from the dead on the third day” (I Corinthians 15:3-4).
The Centrality of the Cross
“I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” – 1 Corinthians 2:2
Anybody who investigates Christianity for the first time is immediately struck by its emphasis on the death of Jesus and especially by the disproportionate amount of space that the evangelists devote to the last week of his life.
The Gospel writers had learned this emphasis from Jesus himself. On three separate and solemn occasions Jesus predicted his death, saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things . . . and . . . be killed” (Mark 8:31). It must happen, he insisted, because it had been foretold in the Old Testament Scriptures. Jesus also referred to his death as his “hour,” the hour for which he had come into the world. At first he repeated that it was “not yet,” but at last he was able to say that “the hour has come.”
Perhaps most striking of all is the fact that Jesus made deliberate provision for how he wished to be remembered. He instructed his disciples to take, break, and eat bread in memory of his body to be broken for them, and to take, pour out, and drink wine in memory of his blood to be shed for them. Death spoke from both elements. No symbolism could be more self-evident. How did he want to be remembered? Not for his example or his teaching, not for his words or works, not even for his living body or flowing blood, but for his body given and blood shed in death.
So the church has been right of its choice of symbol for Christianity. It could have chosen any one of several options—for example, the crib, symbolizing incarnation; or the towel, symbol of humble service; or others. But it passed them by in favor of the cross.
The choice of the cross as the supreme Christian symbol was all the more remarkable because in Greco-Roman culture the cross was an object of shame. How, then, could the apostle Paul say that he gloried in it? This is the question to which we will seek an answer this week.
For further reading: 1 Corinthians 1:17-25
John Stott, Through the Bible, Through the Year: Daily Reflections from Genesis to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), p. 264.
