All students know the dangers of approaching their subject with preconceived ideas. Yet many would-be enquirers come to the Bible with their minds already made up.
What then must we do? We must commit ourselves, heart and mind, soul and will, home and life, personally and unreservedly to Jesus Christ. We must humble ourselves before him. We must trust in him as our Saviour and submit to him as our Lord; and then go on to take our place as loyal members of the church and responsible citizens in the community.
If we claim to be Christian, we must be like Christ.
The first thing that has to be said about the biblical gospel of reconciliation, however, is that it begins with reconciliation to God, and continues with a reconciled community in Christ. Reconciliation is not a term the Bible uses to describe ‘coming to terms with oneself’, although it does insist that it is only through losing ourselves in love for God and neighbour that we truly find ourselves.
The faithful preaching of the gospel is the God-appointed means by which the prince of darkness is overthrown and God shines his light into human hearts.
Souls are won for Christ by tears and sweat and pain, especially in prayer and in sacrificial personal friendship.
The essence of discipleship is union with Christ, which means identification with him in both his sufferings and his glory.
Indeed, an honest and humble acknowledgment of the evil in our flesh, even after the new birth, is the first step to holiness. To speak quite plainly, some of us are not leading holy lives for the simple reason that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. No man ever cries aloud for deliverance who has not seen his own wretchedness. In other words, the only way to arrive at faith in the power of the Holy Spirit is along the road of self-despair.
And self-sacrifice is what the Bible means by ‘love.’ While sin is possessive, love is expansive. Sin’s characteristic is the desire to get; love’s characteristic is the desire to give.
Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened and some of our vast ignorances diminished.
And that is how it would have stayed, had God not taken the initiative to help us. We would have remained forever agnostic, asking – just like Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus – ‘What is truth?’ but never staying for an answer, never daring to hope that we would receive one. We would be those who worship, for it is part of human nature to worship someone or something, but all our altars would be like the one the apostle Paul found in Athens, dedicated ‘To an unknown god’.
We are to be like Christ in his incarnation.
God has little patience with triflers; ‘he rewards those who seek him’.7.
Everyone who has been truly set free by Jesus Christ expresses liberty in these three ways, first in self-control, next in loving service of our neighbor, and third in obedience to the law of God.
In God’s providence we have four gospels! For Jesus Christ is too great and glorious a person to be captured by one author or one perspective.
We are not, therefore, to regard the cross as defeat and the resurrection as victory. Rather, the cross was the victory won, and the resurrection the victory endorsed, proclaimed and demonstrated.
If we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in a dictionary, but at Calvary.
The radical biblical perspective is to see death not as the termination of life but as the gateway to life.
You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.’ This situation is tragic beyond words. We are missing the destiny for which God made us.
Second, we are to discover this purpose of God in Scripture. The will of God for the people is in the Word of God.