The fears that the few good things that make you happy are slipping through your fingers, and the frustrations that the bad things you hate about yourself or your situation can’t be changed – these fears and these frustrations are what Christmas came to destroy.
Therefore we should pray for each other the way Jesus prays for us in John 17:17 – “Sanctify them in the truth; thy Word is truth.
He may be doing it for you in this Advent season – graciously and tenderly frustrating you with life that is not centered on Christ and filling you with longings and desires that can’t find their satisfaction in what this world offers, but only in the God-man. What a Christmas gift that might be! Let all your frustrations with this world throw you onto the Word of God. It will become sweet – like walking into paradise.
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man.
The church is not called to be responsible for the way unbelievers run their lives. But we are called to be responsible, by the power of the Spirit and for the glory of Jesus, for the way believers live and the kind of relationships that are cultivated in the fellowship of the church.
Rather we say that in the cross, God had in view the actual, effective redemption of his children from all that would destroy them, including their own unbelief. And we affirm that when Christ died particularly for his bride, he did not simply create a possibility or an opportunity for salvation, but really purchased and infallibly secured for them all that is necessary to get them saved, including the grace of regeneration and the gift of faith.
The Calvary road with Jesus is not a joyless road. It is a painful one, but it is a profoundly happy one. When we choose the fleeting pleasures of comfort and security over the sacrifices and sufferings of missions and evangelism and ministry and love, we choose against joy.
Cancer does not win if we die. It wins if we fail to cherish Christ.
And what we have seen is that this embracing of suffering is not just an accompaniment of our witness to Christ; it is the visible expression of it. Our sufferings make Christ’s sufferings known so that people can see the kind of love Christ offers. We complete Christ’s afflictions by providing what they do not have, namely, a personal, vivid presentation to those who do not see Christ suffer in person. The.
Now comes the really amazing part. What is offered to the world, to everyone who hears the gospel, is not a love or saving achievement designed for all and therefore especially for no one; but rather, what is offered is the absolute fullness of all that Christ achieved for his elect.
Prayer is the form of faith that connects us today with the grace that will make us adequate for tomorrow’s ministry.
This is why it is often called sovereign grace: it raises the dead. The dead do not raise themselves. God does by his grace. And it is this “glorious grace” that will be praised for all eternity.
No man,” Wilberforce wrote, “has a right to be idle.” “Where is it,” he asked, “that in such a world as this, health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?
We desire the wrong things, and we desire right things in the wrong way. And both are deadly – like eating pleasant poison.
Apart from new birth, I am my problem. You are not my main problem. My parents were not my main problem. My enemies are not my main problem. I am my main problem. Not my deeds, and not my circumstances, and not the people in my life, but my nature is my deepest personal problem.
If you have pity for perishing people and a passion for the reputation of Christ, you must care about world missions.
There is no point in romanticizing other religions that reject the deity and saving work of Christ. They do not know God. And those who follow them tragically waste their lives.
Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain.
The new covenant is purchased by the blood of Christ, effected by the Spirit of Christ, and appropriated by faith in Christ.
Which means, therefore, that our Bible reading is never just for seeing, never just for learning and doctrine. It is not even just for savoring, if that savoring is thought of in a private way that leaves us unchanged in our relationship with others. No. We read the Bible – we always read the Bible – for the kind of seeing and savoring Christ that transforms us into his likeness.