Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.
Luther also said that one of our biggest problems was our own “good” works. They obscure our need for a Savior. “At the cross,” said Gerhard Forde, “God has stormed the last bastion of the self, the last presumption that you were really going to do something for him.” Genuine freedom awaits all who stop trusting in their own work and start trusting in Christ’s work.
We are, without doubt, broken people living with other broken people in a broken world.
Christian growth does not involve becoming stronger and stronger, more and more competent every day. It involves becoming more and more aware of how weak and incompetent we are and how strong and competent Jesus was and continues to be for us.
Paul doesn’t pray that the Colossians will find something they don’t have; rather he prays they’ll grow in their awareness and understanding of what they already have.
Like Adam and Eve, each time we sin we’re choosing to be our own deity. We’re placing ultimate trust in ourselves, not in our Creator and Savior and Lord.
Because Jesus paid it all, we are free from the need to do it all. Our identity, worth, and value, are not anchored in what we can accomplish but in what Jesus accomplished for us.
God knows us in all our conniving, self-centered, and jealousy-laden splendor and loves us anyway.
He knows that the only way to break the cycle of retribution and oppression and heartbreak is to demolish the ladder of deserving altogether.
The gospel is good news for losers, not winners. It’s for those who long to be freed from the slavery of believing that all of their significance, meaning, purpose, and security depend on their ability to “become a better you.” The gospel tells us that weakness precedes usefulness – that, in fact, the smaller you get, the freer you will be.
In fact, most of us convince ourselves that we’re actually honoring Jesus with our rules and regulations, that we’re paying attention to him and pleasing him more than ever. But all the while, we’re only demonstrating that we believe in ourselves much more than we do in Jesus. Our default faith mode is to trust, above all things, our own ability to create a safe, controllable, predictable world.
A theology of the cross accepts the difficult thing rather than immediately trying to change it or use it. It looks directly into pain, and “calls a thing what it is” instead of calling evil good and good evil.
And there’s nothing more enslaving than self-salvation projects. They never end because they never work. The story of David and Goliath is meant to point us to the one true hero, the one hero who is perfect at all times.
God ensures that his unworthy servant is made fully aware of this undeserved deliverance.
I showed him how the gospel frees us from this obsessive pressure to perform, this slavish demand to “become.” I showed him how the gospel declares that in Christ “we already are.
I’m not saying the Christian life is effortless; the real question is Where are we focusing our efforts? Are we working hard to perform? Or are we working hard to rest in Christ’s performance for us?
The banner under which the Christian lives reads, “It is finished.
As C. S. Lewis reminded us in Surprised by Joy, “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
Living for anything else besides God leads to death, not freedom.
Cheer up; you’re a lot worse off than you think you are, but in Jesus you’re far more loved than you ever could have imagined.
A tribal mindset is antithetical to the gospel. The gospel demands that we be missional, because the gospel is the story of God sacrificing himself for his enemies.