The gospel assures me that God cares about everything I do and will listen to my prayers. He may not answer them the way I want, but if he doesn’t it is because he knows things I do not.
Jesus is the prophet Jonah should have been. Yet, of course, he is infinitely more than that. Jesus did not merely weep for us; he died for us. Jonah went outside the city, hoping to witness its condemnation, but Jesus Christ went outside the city to die on a cross to accomplish its salvation.
Repentance without rejoicing will lead to despair. Rejoicing without repentance is shallow and will only provide passing inspiration instead of deep change.
Grace abolishes fear of failure, which may have been part of Jonah’s problem. So many of our deepest longings to succeed are really just ways to be for ourselves what Christ should be for us. Really we are saying, “If I achieve this, then I am acceptable!” But when we stop trying to steal self-acceptance from other sources, we lose our fear. We become fearless without becoming defiant.
There is legitimate guilt that is removed through repentance and restitution, and then there is irremediable guilt. When people say, “I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,” they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important to them than God’s. Idols function like gods in our lives, and so if we make career or parental approval our god and we fail it, then the idol curses us in our hearts for the rest of our lives. We can’t shake the sense of failure.
Jonah so loathed the Assyrian race that he saw God’s forgiveness of them to be the worst thing that could have happened. He was willing to confront and denounce the Ninevites, but he could not love them. He didn’t want them saved; he didn’t want them to receive God’s mercy.109.
Because grace is grace. If it is truly grace, then no one was worthy of it at all, and that made all equal. And with that realization, he added, “Salvation comes only from the Lord!” It doesn’t belong to any race or class of people, nor do religious people deserve it more than the irreligious. It does not come from any quality or merit in us at all. Salvation is only from the Lord.
A superiority complex and an inferiority complex are basically the same. They are both results of being overinflated.
One of the signs that an object is functioning as an idol is that fear becomes one of the chief characteristics of life. When we center our lives on the idol, we become dependent on it. If our counterfeit god is threatened in any way, our response is complete panic. We do not say, “What a shame, how difficult,” but rather “This is the end! There’s no hope!
But if you are unwilling to risk your place in the palace for your neighbors, the palace owns you.
What makes a person a Christian is not our love for God, which is always imperfect, but God’s love for us.
If, like the elder brother, you believe that God ought to bless you and help you because you have worked so hard to obey him and be a good person, then Jesus may be your helper, your example, even your inspiration, but he is not your Savior. You are serving as your own Savior. Underneath.
Pride makes you a predator, not a person.
She must be able to say in her heart, “My desire for completely successful and happy children is selfish. It’s all about my need to feel worthwhile and valuable. If I really knew God’s love – then I could accept less-than-perfect kids and wouldn’t be crushing them. If God’s love meant more to me than my children, I could love my children less selfishly.
God does not love us because we are serviceable; He loves us simply because He loves us. This is the only kind of love we can ever be secure in, of course, since it is the only kind of love we cannot possibly lose. This is grace.
A God who substitutes himself for us and suffers so that we may go free is a God you can trust.
Bernard of Clairvaux is reputed to have once said, “To see a man humble under prosperity is the greatest rarity in the world.
God’s grace becomes wondrous, endlessly consoling, beautiful, and humbling only when we fully believe, grasp, and remind ourselves of all three of these background truths – that we deserve nothing but condemnation, that we are utterly incapable of saving ourselves, and that God has saved us, despite our sin, at infinite cost to himself.
A salvation earned by good works and moral effort would favor the more able, competent, accomplished, and privileged. But salvation by sheer grace favors the failed, the outsiders, the weak, because it goes only to those who know salvation must be by sheer grace.
The birth of a new baby is a wonderful event. The birth of a new life in Christ is an eternal event. Hallelujah! Born once, die twice. Born twice, die once.