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January 8 - February 2, 2021
Short of the incarnation itself, this is perhaps the high point of divine revelation in all the Bible.
When we speak of God’s glory, we are speaking of who God is, what he is like, his distinctive resplendence, what makes God God.
The only two words Jesus will use to describe his own heart are gentle and lowly (Matt. 11:29). And the first two words God uses to describe who he is are merciful and gracious.
Unlike us, who are often emotional dams ready to break,
This is why the Old Testament speaks of God being “provoked to anger” by his people dozens of times (especially in Deuteronomy; 1–2 Kings; and Jeremiah). But not once are we told that God is “provoked to love” or “provoked to mercy.” His anger requires provocation; his mercy is pent up, ready to gush forth.
It’s
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(For fallen humans, we learn in the New Testament, this is reversed. We are to provoke one another to love, according to Hebrews 10:24. Yahweh needs no provoking to
love, only to anger.
We need no provoking to anger, o...
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Once again, the Bible is one long attempt to deconstruct our natural vision o...
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“Keeping steadfast love for thousands.” This could equally be translated “keeping steadfast love to a thousand generations,”
This does not mean that his goodness shuts off with generation number 1,001. It is God’s own way of saying: There is no termination date on my commitment to you. You can’t get rid of my grace to you. You can’t outrun my mercy. You can’t evade my goodness. My heart is set on you.
His covenant love flows down to a thousand generations; but he visits generational sins to the third or fourth generation.
4 What we see in Exodus 34, and what Owen and Sibbes confirm, echoes throughout the rest of the Bible, such as at Isaiah 54:7–8, where the Lord says: For a brief moment I deserted you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you. The
Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is.
This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merci...
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The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over mul...
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Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is no...
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you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you ...
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There are two ways to live the Christian life. You can live it either for the heart of Christ or from the heart of Christ. You can live for the smile of God or from it.
The purpose of this chapter, through reflecting on the book of Galatians, is to bring the heart of Christ to bear on our chronic tendency to function out of a subtle belief that our obedience strengthens the love of God.
The central message of Galatians is that the freeness of God’s grace and love is not only the gateway but also the pathway of the Christian life.
As the gospel sinks in more deeply over time, and we wade ever deeper into the heart of Christ, one of the first outer shells of our old life that the gospel pierces is the doing of works unto approval.
It’s another thing to believe that God continues, just as freely, to put away all our present failures that occur after new birth.
Now that we know God as Father, now that our eyes have been opened to our treasonous rebellion against our Creator, we feel more deeply than ever the ugliness of sin. Failure makes the soul cringe like never before.
“Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood”—and now we hear Paul’s driving concern—“much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.”
more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”
When you sin, do a thorough job of repenting. Re-hate sin all over again. Consecrate yourself afresh to the Holy Spirit and his pure ways. But reject the devil’s whisper that God’s tender heart for you has grown a little colder, a little stiffer.
We love until we are betrayed. Jesus continued to the cross despite betrayal. We love until we are forsaken. Jesus loved through forsakenness. We love up to a limit. Jesus loves to the end.
world, he loved them to the end.
It is common for equals to love, and for superiors to be beloved; but for the King of princes, for the Son of God, for Jesus Christ to love man thus: this is amazing, and that so much the more, for that man the object of his love, is so low, so mean, so vile, so undeserving, and so inconsiderable, as by the scriptures, everywhere he is described to be.
One way we glorify God is by our obedience to him, our refusing to believe we know best and instead trusting that his way is the way of life.
The Bible calls us to live in an “honorable” way among unbelievers “so that . . . they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Pet. 2:12).
He wrote a treatise called The End for Which God Created the World in which he argued this single point, that the world exists for the glory of God.
(And those of us who have been pretty squeaky clean will get there one day and realize more than ever how deeply sin and self-righteousness and pride and all kinds of willful subconscious rebellions were way down deep inside us,
we too will stand, astonished, at how great his heart is for us.)
Ephesians 2:7 is telling you that your death is not an end but a beginning. Not a wall, but a door. Not an exit, but an entrance.
For those not in Christ, this life is the best it will ever get. For those in Christ, for whom Ephesians 2:7 is the eternal vista just around the next bend in the road, this life is the worst it will ever get.
To ask, “Now how do I apply this to my life?” would be a trivialization of the point of this study.
If an Eskimo wins a vacation to a sunny place, he doesn’t arrive in his hotel room, step out onto the balcony, and wonder how to
apply that to his life. He just enjoys it....
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