Kindle Notes & Highlights
The universalist Jesus cannot be found in the Gospels; the Jesus we find there is too busy putting himself at the center of everything. The universalist Jesus is safe and safely ignored. It is the compelling Jesus of the Scriptures who refuses to be disregarded.
The security Christianity’s exclusive gospel offers is different than the security offered by other religions, which all essentially say, “If you can jump through these hoops, you can be saved.” That sounds secure but there are too many variables involved. Christianity says, “No hoops. Only Jesus.”
The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) is a great kingdom blueprint, a beautiful proclamation of what the kingdom of God looks like.
The problem is that in sin we are constantly using others.
And Jesus goes even further than that. By receiving the full brunt of the wrath of God for sin, he rises nailed to the intersection of justice and mercy only to be lowered into the grave, a dead man. And there he turns death itself upside down.
So this is a key tenet of orthodox belief in the Christian religion. You can adhere to some of the morals espoused in Christian teaching, you can have a great affection for the traditions of Christian religion, you can enjoy going to church and reading your Bible, but if you don’t believe Jesus Christ died, was buried, and then was resurrected, you’re not a Christian.
But the Easter holiday marks the central event in human history. At Easter, Christians celebrate the reality
Easter changes everything. As Jaroslav Pelikan said, “If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen, nothing else matters.”
But the gospel story goes deeper than that. It is not simply about having sins forgiven and receiving a “ticket to heaven.” Jesus, in making these claims about what he’s done and who he is, receives those who seek forgiveness into a kingdom that is bigger than a blank slate and clean start.
Grace has been commonly defined as “unmerited favor,” and that’s a fine enough definition. Grace is the giving of a blessing apart from an earning of the blessing. The idea of grace in Christianity corresponds to the notion that God saves sinners purely because he loves them and therefore wants to save them. He does not save them because they’ve been good enough to somehow merit his interest. Real, authentic Christianity teaches that only Jesus Christ is able to do the impossible work of justifying sinners before a perfect and holy God.
Christianity teaches this: if you don’t have grace, you aren’t saved. When you boil it all down, this is the thing that distinguishes the Christian religion from every other religion and philosophy in the world. Christianity has a few things in common with every religious ideology and more things in common with a few specific religions (such as Judaism or Islam), but there is one thing that only Christianity has, the thing that makes it utterly unique. That thing is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
the law itself is not able to supply what it demands.
And this grace comes to us in the declaration of God considering Jesus’s good behavior as our good behavior.
Praise God for his marvelous grace! His grace that hijacks us and waylays us and apprehends us and transforms us and transfers to us the very Lord of Creation himself, Jesus Christ.
Americans are about six percent of the world’s population and we account for about forty-five percent of the world’s philanthropy. Among Americans, believers are far more generous than secularists. Among believers, Protestants are more liberal in their giving than Catholics. Among Protestants, evangelicals are more generous than mainliners. But if you were [to] ask a secular arbiter of all that is philanthropic for his opinion on how we were doing, he would invert the whole thing.
The truth is that nobody out-serves or out-gives evangelical Christians worldwide. We just don’t host telethons.
Many religions, like Islam for example, seem to thrive on conquest and power. Christianity grows best under hardship. There are more Christians in China today, for instance, where free expression of faith is illegal, than the total population of the United States.
Christians are called to good works. This is how people know we are Christians. But they also know we are Christians—and not charitable Buddhists—because we don’t make good works our boast.
It’s “good works as payback” that accounts for legalism and graceless religion and that spurs self-righteousness. If we treat our good works as payback, we’ll burn out quickly, because we can never repay the infinite debt our sin has created. The glory of God is a huge and weighty thing. How arrogant we would be if we thought we could score some of it with some good deeds. We are not that good.
So if works cannot be payback and they cannot be self-righteous, what are they? Two things: worship and warfare.
Good works are the signposts we build toward heaven. They point people upward. I mean, the same Jesus who said to keep your good works on the down low also said this: “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16).
there are no compulsory pilgrimages in Christianity, no far-flung hoops to jump through. The pilgrimage has been made: God incarnated in man.
During an earlier interrogation at Ploiesti I had told an officer who threatened to kill me, “Sir, let me explain how I see this issue. Your supreme weapon is killing. My supreme weapon is dying. Here is how it works. You know that my sermons on tape have spread all over the country. If you kill me, those sermons will be sprinkled with my blood. Everyone will know I died for my preaching. And everyone who has a tape will pick it up and say, ‘I’d better listen again to what this man preached, because he really meant it: he sealed it with his life.’ So, sir, my sermons will speak ten times
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Jesus did not say he is making all new things. No, he is making all things new.
I said, “Why Ecclesiastes?” She said, “Because I see that having a bunch of possessions and money and fame doesn’t do anything. It tells me I didn’t waste my life.”
One thing I have learned over the course of our church’s afflictions is that when a saint’s body gives way, their spirit builds up.
So you have, essentially, three ways to live: by goodness, by badness, or by the gospel. Or, to put it another way: law, license, or Lord.
