Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary

by J.D. Greear

Being converted to Jesus is learning to so adore God that we would gladly renounce everything we have to follow Him.

Being commanded to love someone you have no natural affection for becomes wearisome. True love grows as a response to loveliness.

a heart that doesn’t want to love God.

For most of us, life is like one big Survivor episode where we are trying to convince God and everyone else why we are not the ones who should be thrown off the island.

Religious activities fail to address the “root” idolatries that drive our sin.

However, it was apparent that he had simply traded sex for religion as the outer manifestation of his true desire. What he really wanted—his “root idol”—was power over others.

This is a new means of pursuing an old idol.

True worship is obedience to God for no other reason than that you delight in God. There is a fundamental difference in serving God to get something from Him and serving Him to get more of Him.

You may have simply discovered religion to be a more convenient means to other cherished idols like respect, pride, success, a good family, or prosperity.

The assurance of God’s presence and approval takes away our sense of nakedness and our craving for their approval.

The third reason religious change doesn’t work has to do with its sustainability.

“In Christ, there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, and nothing I have done that makes You love me less.” “Your presence and approval are all I need for everlasting joy.” “As You have been to me, so I will be to others.” “As I pray, I’ll measure Your compassion by the cross and Your power by the resurrection.”

That means that God could not love me any more than He does right now, because God could not love and accept Christ any more than He does, and God sees me in Christ.

God’s righteousness has been given to me as a gift. He now sees me according to how Christ has lived, not on the basis of what kind of week I’ve had.

Satan starts with what you did, and tears down who you are. The Holy Spirit starts with what Christ has declared over you, and helps you rebuild what you did.

Zacchaeus was not changed by a command of Jesus, but by an experience with Jesus.

It is “the grace of God,” Paul says, that trains us to “renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives.”

When do you hold your head up the highest? What is there that you hope people find out about you? Do you constantly mention your job, or the job you think you’re going to have when you graduate, or where you got your degree from? Are you always looking for ways to show off your house or car? Does your heart soar with pride when you talk about your kids? If you’re a pastor, do you love it when people ask you how big your church is? Or do you hate that because it’s small? Do you love it when people compare you positively to other pastors?

Is it when you don’t get the recognition you know you deserve?

only “perfect love” casts out fear.

(a) its intensity toward us (God could not love us more than He already does); (b) its ability to satisfy us (we are created to be satisfied fully by the love of God); and (c) its control of all things in our lives (we know that the God who controls all the universe loves us and will never

leave us and is controlling every molecule in the universe to work out His good and pe...

God calls them His “treasured” possession.

The Mighty God of the universe, the God who has everything and lacks nothing, calls a helpless, guilty people His “treasure.” He heard their cries, entered their pain, and rescued them.

beautiful.

Yes. But ceasing sin is the by-product of seeing God.

When you have seen the beauty of God and felt the weightiness of God’s majesty in your soul, sin’s power over you will be broken. I often tell college-aged guys at our church that they can turn their sexual drives on and off like a light switch. They never believe me. I tell them, “I’ll prove it to you . . . Imagine that you are alone with your girlfriend, sitting with her on the couch at her house. Your sexual desires begin to take over and you feel like there is no way you can turn them off. At that moment, you feel totally out of control, like there is no way to say ‘no’ to the power of temptation.” They say, “Exactly.” I tell them, “At just that moment, her Army Ranger father walks in. . . . See? Sexual desire, off like a light switch!” Where did it go? It is not that they suddenly lost libido, it was just that in that moment their fear of her Ranger father was weightier to them than the sexual lust. Desire for her was surpassed by a desire to avoid death. The reason many of us feel like we “can’t say no” to temptations is that God does not have that kind of weight in our hearts. God’s authority must be greater than our desires; His beauty should be more attractive than any lust of the flesh. In other words, the reason we can’t say no to temptation is not that our desires for those things is too large; it’s because our desire for God is too small.

In the cross we see the magnanimity of God’s grace. God did more than carry us on eagles’ wings from danger; He rescued us out of the jaws of death by substituting Himself in our place.

He did that for you because you are a treasure to Him.

Did you know that nothing else in Scripture, except for Christ Himself, is referred to directly as “the power of God”?

Those people who give God a tithe so they can get on with a self-centered life have not yet embraced the path of discipleship.

We are racked by guilt and give to alleviate it. Gospel-centered giving, by contrast, is characterized by freedom.

Fallen human nature loves laws, because we love self-justification. But laws keep us from dealing with the real issue—our heart.

Now, let’s remember here, lest we saddle ourselves with a burden we can’t carry, that the work of salvation, from start to finish, is God’s work. God didn’t lay the Great Commission on our shoulders as if He expected us to go accomplish it for Him.

Have you evaluated your talents, your opportunities, and leveraged them for maximum kingdom impact? This is not just the duty of a select, specially-called-out few. Honestly, sometimes I think we invented this whole language of “calling” to mask the fact that most Christians are not really living as disciples of Jesus. Radical generosity and radical commitment to the mission is the response of every person who has experienced the grace of Jesus Christ. Following Jesus, being His disciple, means living as He lived. He leveraged His life for the lost.

That’s how Christians in every generation are to be. The house of salvation is not built by us, for God; but by God, for us.

Right doctrine is, of course, essential, but no “doctrinal flower” can transform your heart. Only the beauty of Jesus transforms the heart. I know some will say, “But the five points of Calvinism are the essence of the gospel!” Perhaps. But if you emphasize conformity to your version of the five points more than you do a simple worship of the Christ of the cross, you have replaced adoration with information. Right information is essential, but I have seen far too many people who are more excited about the TULIP than they were in awe of the cross.