More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I’m like you; familiarity causes me not to treasure the gospel of Jesus Christ as I should.
exegete
If you look into the mirror of God’s Word and see someone in need of grace, why would you be impatient with others who share that need?
For the believer, harsh, critical, impatient, and irritated responses to others are always connected to forgetting or denying who we are and what we have been given in Jesus. It is very clear that no one gives grace better than a person who is deeply convinced of his own need of it and who is cogently aware of the grace he has been, and is being, given.
In the middle of your sadness there is celebration, because you’ve read the final chapter and you know how God’s grand story is going to end.
Are you loading kingly burdens on your shoulders today, trying to build what you cannot build and forgetting what God has already built for you?
The glories of the created world are meant to be glorious, but they are not meant to be the thing that you look to for life. No, all the glories of the created world together are meant to be one big finger that points you to the God of glory, who made each one of them and is alone able to give you life. Worshiping the creation is never a pathway to life; it leads you in the opposite direction.
May God give you grace to remember your identity as his child in those moments when remembering is essential.
In grace, he leads you where you didn’t plan to go in order to produce in you what you couldn’t achieve on your own.
We should pray for purity of desire, wisdom to recognize the enemy’s tricks, and strength to fight the battles we can’t avoid.
But often we live with the compulsion, anxiety, and drivenness of eternity amnesiacs. We get so focused on the opportunities, responsibilities, needs, and desires of the here and now that we lose sight of what is to come.
Let the values of eternity be the values that shape your living today, and keep telling yourself that the difficulties of today will someday completely pass away. Belief in eternity can clarify your values and renew your hope. Pray that God, by his grace, will help you remember forever right here, right now.
Face the fact today that you’ll never outgrow your need for grace, no matter how much you learn and how much you mature, until you are on the other side and your struggle is over because sin is no more (see Phil. 3:12–16).
God offers you things of supreme value (his forgiveness, his presence, welcome into his kingdom, a clean conscience, and a pure heart). These things will never pass away. They are the eternally valuable gifts of divine grace. This leaves you with this question: “What do I really want in life: the success of God’s agenda of grace or the fulfillment of my catalog of desires?” At the end of the day, what do you long for: for God’s grace to do its work or for more of the stuff that this physical created world has to offer?
You can lose
your house, your job, your family, your friendships, your health, and your church, but you will not lose these things. You can face disappointment and loss, but these things will remain. You can suffer the pain of defeat, but these things will still be yours. You can lose it all, but nothing can take life from you, because what defines life is simply not for the taking.
Instead, it reveals that struggles are part of God’s plan for you. This means that if you’re God’s child, you must never allow yourself to think that the hard things you are now going through are failures of God’s character, promises, power, or plan.
It all makes us irritated, impatient, bitter, angry, and discontent.
We love ourselves so much that we have little energy left to love the One who is love.
The first is that you need to understand that you were created to love. You don’t just love, you are a lover. Every human being’s life is a quest to find something to love and a quest to be loved. This means that you are always surrendering the affections of your heart to something. Whatever commands the love of your heart also shapes the direction of your life.
The desire for the love of another person is not wrong, but it must not rule your heart.
A desire for even a good thing becomes a bad thing when that desire becomes a ruling thing.
Yes, by grace we love the world less than we once did and we surely love God more than before, but our hearts are still torn and our loyalties at points are still confused. But we need not fret, because grace will win and bring final rest to our worship and our love.
God has put on your plate. You see, you are always preaching to yourself some kind of worldview, some
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
So your weaknesses are not the big danger that you should fear. What you should really fear are your delusions of strength. When you tell yourself that you are strong, you quit being excited about God’s rescuing, transforming, and empowering grace.
If you’ve forgotten who you are in Christ, what are you left with? You’re left with Christless Christianity, which is little more than a system of theology and rules.
shopping for it horizontally.
This is why faith is only ever a gift of divine grace. You and I have all the power in the world to doubt and no independent power at all to believe. So if you are living by faith, don’t proudly pat yourself on the back as if you did something great. No, raise your eyes and your hands toward heaven and thank God for gifting you with the desire and ability to believe.
So look into the mirror of Hebrews 11 and examine your faith. You don’t need to do that fearfully, anxious at what you’ll see. You don’t need to deny the reality of your spiritual struggle or act as if you’re something that you’re not. You don’t have to fear exposure, because your struggle of faith has been more than adequately addressed by the grace of the cross of the Lord Jesus. Run to him and confess the off-and-on-again faith of your heart. He will not turn you away.
will I recognize God’s care when it comes?
Everything that I do and every request that I make of God is to be done in recognition that everything that exists, including me, was made for his glory.
Without rescuing grace, I will continue to live as a glory thief, and so will you.
Hope in life is never about doing whatever you need to do to get your way. Hope in life is not found in expending all your resources, time, energy, and gifts to realize your personal dreams. Hope in life is not found in working yourself into as much control as possible over the people and situations in your life. In a word, hope is not found in your will being done.
God was teaching Israel that they must no longer look at life from the vantage point of human wisdom and strength because they were now the children of the Lord almighty.
Knowing you live in between the two is the key to a restful and wise Christian life.
Your acceptance with God is just as secure on your very worst day as it is on your very best day, because it was purchased once and for all by your suffering Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
So cry out for rescue—that God would give you a thankful, humble, and patient heart. His transforming grace is your only defense against envy.
He covers your past with his grace; he protects, provides for, and empowers you in the present; and he holds every aspect of your future in his sovereign and gracious hands.
you don’t belong to you anymore.
remind yourself of who you are and what you have become.
We rest in God’s presence and constant care (vertical), and we toil with our hands, busy at the work we have been commanded to do (horizontal). We rest in our work and work in our rest.
You can search for hope horizontally in the situations, experiences, physical possessions, locations, and relationships of everyday life.
schizophrenia
Your eternity amnesia makes you unrealistically expectant, vulnerable to temptation, all too driven, dependent on people and things that will only disappoint you, and sadly susceptible to doubting the goodness of God.
This broken, sin-scarred mess can’t be all there is.
We were created to be servants of God, but sin makes us lovers of self. We were made to worship the Creator, but sin causes us to worship the creation. We were designed to live for God’s glory, but sin causes us to make life all about our own glory.
daily surrendering
personal, gracious, and continuous intervention
we are not as smart as we tend to think we are. It reminds us that there is so much we don’t know or understand.
