Recovering Redemption: A Gospel Saturated Perspective on How to Change

by Matt Chandler

Your and our approval comes from God, not from them—not from your friends, your coworkers, your competitors, your critics—because at best, their opinions have a very limited shelf life.

enables us to walk in one fluid motion of humility and confidence. These two qualities, within the context of gospel living, can begin to glide right along with each other, until they almost become one and the same thing.

Now we can just live to serve and worship and lead and love and relax and enjoy the blessings of God.

The way they respond to you doesn’t determine the way you treat them, the way you remain obedient to the Lord, or the decisions you make on behalf of your family. Because your satisfaction comes from Him, not from them.

because we keep looking to worldly things to fill us up.

God, in what’s known as His common grace toward all people (differentiated from His saving grace, which forgives our sin and effectuates the gospel) provides us with all kinds of things that anyone can enjoy, Christian or otherwise.

every gift of common grace represents a fresh, new opportunity for us to celebrate His wonder, His mercy, and His glory. He is the one—not our ample income or our remarkably good looks—who is responsible for these blessings. He is the one who created into His world such a wide color palette of flavors and textures, of aromas and pleasures. And so He is the one to be worshiped and thanked and glorified every time we experience even the most basic of His material gifts.

Religion is always outside-in.

The gospel goes from the inside out.

Holiness and righteousness has been imputed to you—reborn inside of you—and nothing you can do can earn you any more favor than that.

The reason why we study His Word, why we attack our sin, why we share generously from our resources, and why we serve the people around us is not to persuade Him to love us. We do these things because He already does love us . . . and because He wants us to dig even deeper into the treasury of His blessing, into the joy and sweetness and abundant living His gospel unlocks for us.

you can get off-track with the gospel song too.

Becoming a Christian has nothing to do with being good or being brought up around reasonably good people.

Can being bad make a Christian not a Christian?

one of the key ways you can tell you’re saved—as backwards as this logic may feel or sound—is when your faith is continually leading you toward repentance, and Jesus is continually bringing about change. The ongoing response of a Christian to the gospel is a steady stream of ongoing repentance.

But “repent and believe” is much, much more than that. It is a foundational theme that continues forward in the life of a Christian. By means of the active, eternal grace of God, “repent and believe” becomes the living, growing, ever-renewing lifestyle of the Spirit-led believer.

Anybody (obviously) can call themselves a Christian. They can want to be good, can wish they were different, can make any number of outside-in adjustments, trying to better themselves. But only a Christian has been given what he or she needs to truly hate their sin from the ground floor up, to desire true righteousness from the inside out, and to challenge what’s truly wrong with themselves from a point of diagnostic clarity.

the fruit of repentance is how we know it.

repentance growing up out of our hearts is a leading indicator of genuine belief on the inside.

how can we tell if our repentance is real—the kind that truly leads to change?

grief is also a fitting term for describing what happens in the aftermath of sin. Of all the things our sin leaves us with, one of the worst is this: a measure of loss.

Ultimately, we will end up feeling some level of sorrow because of it.

two broad categories: godly grief or worldly grief

Not too worried about what we did or who was affected, just really sorry we got caught. And if we hadn’t gotten caught, we’d probably still be doing it.

This is the kind of sinful sorrow that responds to little more than our own pain.

What’s often missing from this picture is any view of God—a vertical reaction—the understanding that sin is bad not only because of how it stings but because of the poison it’s made of.

Horizontal grief is much less concerned about being broken, and much more upset about being busted.

But raw emotion alone does not equal repentance.

The difference between changing our ways and being stuck in the same old stuff is often the same difference between wanting to be whole and just wanting to feel better again.

We’re sad at how it’s hurt us, or how it’s caused us to hurt someone we care about.

If we just watch it more carefully, we can keep it under control. No problem. Won’t happen again. If we just manage it a little better, we’ll be fine. No need to overreact.

But sin can’t be trained; sin mus...

Sorrow comes from treating sin lightly; change comes from taking sin seriously.

But none of this would’ve happened at all (you think) if your spouse didn’t spend so much money, if your kids hadn’t gone over into the neighbor’s yard, if your job wasn’t so incessantly stressful, if your parents hadn’t been so overbearingly Amish.

bottom line, nobody can make you do but you.

Worldly grief,

It would much rather do the easy lifting of personal blame-shifting, even if it often disguises itself behind diplomatic apologies like, “I’m sorry if I offended you” or “If there’s anything at all that I’ve done . . .”

Call it what you want, but shared grief is just pride with a sad face. And it’s worldly. It kills us.

Important to recognize that these past four actions (and others like them) are not exclusive to non-Christians.

Only Christians have the available option of “grieving” in a way that brings about true, lasting change.

Only the gospel can keep us from needlessly spinning our wheels, wasting valuable sweat and energy in a continually losing cause.

Christians are not confined to grief responses that can never do anything but make us die a little more each day: trying so hard to act like we’re not sinners, or to act like our sin is not really that big a deal—at least not as bad as it seems when we’re the most bummed out about it.

And the sooner we realize this, the sooner we can start experiencing renewed confidence in our relationship with Christ,

repentance is lifetime learning.

The goal of Christian living is not to get past the point of needing to repent, but to realize that God has made us capable through Christ of doing repentance well—repentance that the Bible calls “godly” in nature—what

Where it can grow us up into character and consistency and confidence in Jesus’ power and strength, fully at work in our pitiful weakness.

That’s mercy and grace. From a good, redeeming God.

rather than feeling the need to look so invincible, pretending to be people we’re not—or rather than giving up on ourselves altogether, thinking how disappointed God must be in us—let’s finally start taking some redeemed alternatives for dealing with the reality of our stubborn, resistant, susceptible flesh.

The Word of God will do that for us. It’s surgical. It cuts. It reveals. It opens up our insides, right out there on the MRI slab. And doesn’t miss one ugly detail in the process. Everything comes to light and into view.

This is firsthand evidence, not of God’s damning condemnation, but His precious grace, taking the careful initiative to pinpoint the places where we’re sick and diseased, so that He can show us exactly what we need of Him and how He can make us whole.