The Gospel Coalition

39 years ago today God gave me the privilege of marrying the love of my life.  I am a happy man.  Thank you, dearest Jani, for your tender, rugged faithfulness all through these swiftly passing years.  May we serve our Lord in the fullness of his power, for the renewal of his people, until our dying day.

“If we would find God amid all the religious externals, we must first determine to find him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity.  Now as always God discovers himself to ‘babes’ and hides himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent.  We must simplify our approach to him.  We must strip down to essentials, and they will be found to be blessedly few.  We must put away all effort to impress and come with the guileless candor of childhood.”

A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (London, 1961), page 18.

“God has provided for your perfect deliverance from sin in Christ.  Everything needed for this purpose was finished by him on the cross.  He was your surety.  He suffered for you.  Your sins were crucified with him and nailed to his cross.  They were put to death when he died, for he was your covenant-head, and you, as a member of his body, were legally represented by him and are indeed dead to sin by his dying to sin once.

The law has now no more right to condemn you, a believer, than it has to condemn him.  Justice is bound to deal with you as it has with your risen and ascended Savior.”

William Romaine, The Life, Walk and Triumph of Faith (Cambridge, 1970), page 280. Style updated.

What is true of Christ is more important to me than what is true of me.

I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot.  Would that you were either cold or hot!  So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.  Revelation 3:15-16

“When churches lose their influence, when the Christian message ceases to arrest the indifferent and the unbelieving, when moral decline is obvious in places which once owned biblical standards – when such symptoms as these are evident, then the first need is not to regroup such professing Christianity as remains.  It is rather to ask whether the spiritual decline is not due to a fundamental failure to understand and practise what Christianity really is.”

Iain H. Murray, Evangelicalism Divided (Edinburgh, 2000), page 151.

My restatement of Murray’s point:  If what we today call Christianity is not compelling people’s loyalty, then there is no point in hosting big events down at the Ryman Auditorium to promote it further.  If our Christianity is not apostolic in power, we ourselves have no right to accept it.  As long as the book of Acts remains in our authoritative Bible, we must and may find our way into that story.  Let’s face honestly the distance between biblical Christianity and our own mediocrity and seek God for mercy.  He will honor that humility.

“Soon after I entered the ministry I was called upon to visit the senior elder of my church, who had been taken sick unto death.  He had been a noble and stately figure among us, a certain old-world grace and courtesy reflecting the strength and dignity of his soul.  He had been a great friend of his Master, and he had done his Master’s work in a great way.  I saw him two or three days before he died, when it was known that the end might come at any time, and I found he was enjoying Dickens’ ‘Pickwick Papers’!  I must have made some remark about it, and he replied very simply that he had always been fond of Pickwick, and that he would not be ashamed, when the Master came, to be found deep in the enjoyment of such innocent humor.  I do not know what helpful ministry I brought to him, but I know that he gave to me a broadly human conception of matured piety, which all along the way has enriched my conception of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.”

John Henry Jowett, The Preacher: His Life and Work (New York, 1912), page 204.

“Do you feel any need to leave the Shire now – now that your wish to see [the Elves] has come true already?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. . . . I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way.  I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can’t turn back.  It isn’t to see Elves now, nor dragons, nor mountains, that I want – I don’t rightly know what I want; but I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire.  I must see it through, sir, if you understand me.”

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston, 1994), page 85.

The obvious is sometimes worth saying, namely, that our futures lie out ahead of us, in the future, not behind us.  Out there in the unfamiliar, the demanding, not back in the safe and the predictable.  Out there – in the promises of God calling for our faith.

“When Jesus judges our imperfection, he does it with such compassion that he releases us from the fear that we must pretend to be better than we are.  He assures us that if we will be honest with God, God will be gracious with us.  And the moment we enter into a gracious relationship with God, we not only fall heir to the promises of the gospel, but we are also ready to accept our present duties in the kingdom of love.

With pride dethroned, we are able to accept a much more modest concept of the self.  We are delivered from the error of thinking that we must prove ourselves all the time.  Kindness and truth become acceptable signs of status.  Destructive anxiety cannot overwhelm us, for we are content to leave the work of salvation to God.”

Edward John Carnell, The Kingdom of Love and the Pride of Life (Grand Rapids, 1960), pages 152-153.

“. . . the true doctrine [of the call to gospel ministry] is that no man, whether young or old, rich or poor, learned or unlearned, should presume to dispense the mysteries of Christ without the strongest of all possible reasons for doing so – the imperative, invincible call of God.  No one is to show cause why he ought not to be a minister; he is to show cause why he should be a minister.  His call to the sacred profession is not the absence of a call to any other pursuit; it is direct, immediate, powerful, to this very department of labor.  He is not here because he can be nowhere else, but he is nowhere else because he must be here.”

James Henley Thornwell, “The Call of the Minister,” The Collected Writings (Richmond, 1873), IV:25. Italics original.

HT:  Dr. Sam Storms