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May 20 - August 22, 2025
Agape is not a mere emotional by-product of action but a supernatural outpouring of the grace of God infusing all our behavior with the life of Christ.
It is the love of God which “has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Rom. 5:5 NASB). This kind of love, as Augustine never tired of insisting, is the pivotal factor in the church’s life.
True spirituality is not a superhuman religiosity; it is simply true humanity released from bondage to sin and renewed by the Holy Spirit.
Revival, in his understanding, is not a special season of extraordinary religious excitement, as in many forms of later American revivalism. Rather it is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit which restores the people of God to normal spiritual life after a period of corporate declension.
Edwards was especially concerned to make clear that fallen human nature is fertile ground for a fleshly religiosity which is impressively “spiritual” but ultimately rooted in self-love. High emotional experiences, effusive religious talk, and even praising God and experiencing love for God and man can be self-centered and self-motivated.
Whew! This statement is convicting!
In contrast to this, experiences of renewal which are genuinely from the Holy Spirit are God-centered in character, based on worship, an appreciation of God’s worth and grandeur divorced from self-interest. Such experiences create humility in the convert rather than pride and issue in the creation of a new spirit of meekness, gentleness, forgiveness and mercy.
This suggests that God has chosen to bless his church with the fullness of the Holy Spirit on the condition of its moving toward certain vital norms of health and witness.
Paul intimates in Romans 8:26-27, even prayer itself, the pivotal admission of dependence through which decline begins to turn toward renewal, results from the hidden inspiration of the Spirit.
The earth is blinded by an occupying army of fallen angelic powers, and the kingdom of God is a liberation army advancing the frontiers of light until all the earth is full of the knowledge of God.
the expanding of God’s kingdom in a liberating warfare against the forces of darkness in which the most important battleground is the hearts of men.
suggest that this reluctance is not because the subject is trivial, morbid or dangerous, but because these forces have access to our minds, and they are just as adept at blinding us to their presence as they are at concealing the gospel from the world (2 Cor.
But even under the New Covenant, with an eternal and infinitely perfect leader, the people of God cannot expect to prevail unless they follow that leader.
What is involved in the church’s periods of recession is something deeper, however, than simple refusal to follow or obey its divine leader. The redemptive work of Christ did not consist in a magnified regent issuing a clearer set of laws to follow. Redemption is participatory, not imitative. It is grounded on grace appropriated through faith, not merely on obedience. Spiritual life flows out of union with Christ, not merely imitation of Christ. When the full dimensions of God’s gracious provision in Christ are not clearly articulated in the church, faith cannot apprehend them, and the life of
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Oh wow!
Acceptance of Christ and appropriation of every element in redemption is conditional on awareness of God’s holiness and conviction of the depth of our sin.
The cross, in fact, is the perfect statement both of God’s wrath against sin and of the depth of his love and mercy in the recovery of the damaged creation and its damagers. God’s mercy, patience and love must be fully preached in the church. But they are not credible unless they are presented in tension with God’s infinite power, complete and sovereign control of the universe, holiness, and righteousness.
It is no wonder that the world and the church are not awakened when our leadership is either singing a lullaby concerning these matters or presenting them in a caricature which is so grotesque that it is unbelievable.
The apprehension of God’s presence is the ultimate core of genuine Christian experience, and the touchstone of its authenticity is the believer’s vision of the character of God.
an organic network of compulsive attitudes, beliefs and behavior deeply rooted in our alienation from God. Sin originated in the darkening of the human mind and heart as man turned from the truth about God to embrace a lie about him and consequently a whole universe of lies about his creation.
In any case, the characteristic bent of the flesh is toward independence from God, his truth and his will, as if man himself were God. Therefore the flesh might be called a “God complex.” Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr and Tillich are not wrong, however, in suggesting that anxiety is at the root of much sinful behavior, since the unconscious awareness of our independence from God and an unrelieved consciousness of guilt create a profound insecurity in the unbeliever or the Christian who is not walking in light.
The most advanced saint on earth has neither the faith nor the Spirit-empowered love to do this, and therefore a continual cleansing of our experience through the blood of Christ is necessary for us to be righteous in the sight of God, and this cleansing involves the awareness and admission of our falling short.
On the other hand, Puritan and Pietist efforts to guard against this abuse often led to an admixture of ascetic legalism in the realm of spiritual discipline. An unbalanced stress on auxiliary methods of assurance—testing one’s life by the inspection of works and searching for the internal witness of the Spirit—obscured Luther’s teaching on assurance of salvation through naked reliance on the work of Christ.
Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.
A conscience which is not fully enlightened both to the seriousness of its condition before God, and to the grandeur of God’s merciful provision of redemption, will inevitably fall prey to anxiety, pride, sensuality and all the other expressions of that unconscious despair which Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death.”
The stagnant orthodoxy of twice-born bigots and the confused proclamation of social activists whose minds have gone through the blender of secular humanistic education are both chargeable to the church’s theological weakness, but this cannot frustrate the sovereign grace of God in regenerating his chosen instruments.
Birth is a passive experience and not the effect of action initiated by the one born.
For this reason, many areas of the church which contain a great deal of legal thunder and lightning, exposing at least the surfaces of sin, are full of desperately anxious and bitterly contentious people. Law without grace provokes sin along with exposing it and aggravates it into some of its ugliest expressions.
Therefore we are not to set the estimates of our power to conquer sin according to past experiences of our will power, but are to fix our attention on Christ and the power of his risen life in which we participate: for we have died, and our life is hidden with Christ in God.
First, it must be detached from any assumption that the sin which is to be overcome by faith is limited to conscious voluntary acts of disobedience.
Second, it must be dissociated from quietism,
To borrow a metaphor from Mahayana Buddhism, we are not like the infant monkey which must cling to its mother with all its strength if it is to avoid falling; we are like the kitten which is carried from place to place in its mother’s mouth.
The problem with parish Christianity during its long existence is not that it has failed to be organized strategically, but that it has seldom risen above conformity to the world in its goals, methods and achievements.
What a flood of spiritual life would be released in the body of Christ if these blockages were removed and the undifferentiated heaps of Christians in churches all over the world were gathered into cells linked together in the great arterial system of grace! The power released could only be compared to the outrush of energy produced in molecular fusion.
Paul could even live comfortably with Jewish Christians still being circumcised and observing their traditions so long as their soteriology was straight. Just as the gospel was to set free an infinite variety of individuals, developing their distinctive gifts and kinds of beauty rather than stamping them into a mold of conformity, so it was to come to whole cultures, with their dance patterns of folkways and institutions, and to lift these to the highest level of individual expression, erasing or cleansing only those with idolatrous implications.
“For Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country or language or customs. They do not live in cities of their own, they do not use a peculiar form of speech, they do not follow an eccentric manner of life.”28 A distinctively intellectual brand
In order to cope with this catastrophically shifting environment, the Christian needs to be very deeply rooted in the cross of Christ.
Unless new converts are persuaded to stop leaning on their culture and the law and to lean fully on Jesus Christ in every phase of their lifestyle, their spiritual lives and the mission of the church will inevitably be short-circuited by the process of enculturation.
A dissolving of local congregations into house churches, independent communes or elite task forces would not only disrupt communication, it might create structures which do not by themselves have the power to carry the whole people of God forward through history with the same effectiveness as parish churches.
The natural tendency of ministers is to lash out at all this baptized depravity with the stinging rebuke of the law. Sometimes this is the right course. But it is often necessary to convince sinners (and even sinful Christians) of the grace and love of God toward them, before we can get them to look at their problems.
People may say they believe it and try to pacify their consciences with the message of cheap grace, but they will not succeed in believing the truth about God’s grace until they believe the truth about themselves and begin to strive to change what they see.
A ministry which leads to genuine sanctification and growth, on the other hand, avoids moralism, first by making clear the deep rootage of sin-problems in the flesh so that the congregation is not battling these in the dark, and then by showing that every victory over the flesh is won by faith in Christ, laying hold of union with him in death and resurrection and relying on his Spirit for power over sin.
The relationship of believers to the Holy Spirit is the most important experience of fellowship they have, but it is also the most elusive.
Such counseling simply operates with the Pelagian model of the Christian life common in modern Evangelicalism, assuming that sin problems are only habit patterns of disobedience which can be broken down by the application of will power in a process of dehabituation.
This approach to counseling is fully consistent with the legal approach to sin in Scripture which points out sin and calls for a change in behavior, but it is not sufficiently evangelical because it fails to see that progress must be grounded in the appropriation by faith of the benefits of union with Christ.
There seemed to be a sanctification gap among Evangelicals, a peculiar conspiracy somehow to mislay the Protestant tradition of spiritual growth and to concentrate instead on frantic witnessing activity, sermons on John 3:16 and theological arguments over eschatological subtleties.
When they commence a venture, it is with hours of prayer, while with ordinary Evangelicals it is with hours of talk and organization. The result is often that the Charismatics achieve supernatural results, while the rest of us obtain what is organizable.
New Christians may envy the spiritual gifts of others and covet them. They may become preoccupied with the emotional side effects of Christian experience and lapse into spiritual gluttony, lusting after joy and ignoring its giver and the responsibility of an obedient walk of faith.
Dogmatic orthodoxy and heterodoxy, on the other hand, are generally proud of their inflexibility, mistaking it for conviction.
For the purity of a revival is intimately related to its theological substance.
Live orthodoxy is found, not among those who wave the flag of commitment to biblicism, but among those who live in this focused spotlight of applied biblical truth. “I have no greater joy than this,” says John, “to hear of my children walking in the truth” (3 Jn. 4 NASB).
Christian audiences, producers and financial backers are going to have to learn to appreciate realism in Christian art or they will bind it in moralistic straitjackets which prevent its contact with the actual world, with non-Christian audiences and with young people of every sort, who will soon desert a gelded art to seek poetry and music which is free and real.
