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but God does all, and we do all. . . . We are in different respects wholly passive and wholly active.”
What do you find at the core? You are united to Christ. That is the most irreducible reality about you.
our destiny to be bound up with his rather than with Adam’s.
are so one with Christ that to be united to a prostitute is to unite Christ with a prostitute.
we will all begin to look more like Christ and thus more like one another—each
The Bible says not simply that “God loves” but also that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Love, for the God of the Bible, is not one activity among others.
If you are a Christian, God made you so that he could love you.
We grow in Christ no further than we enjoy his embrace of us.
Paul prays that the Ephesians would be given supernatural power—not power to perform miracles or walk on water or convert their neighbors, but power, such power, the kind that only God himself can give, power to know how much Jesus loves them.
know the love of Christ.
God.” Knowing Christ’s love is the means, and being filled with divine fullness is the purpose.
We don’t go out and attain divine fullness. We receive it.
Puritan Thomas Goodwin wrote that “Christ is love covered over with flesh.”
Holy Spirit is himself divine love because Titus 3:5–6 says that God pours out the Spirit onto us, whereas Romans 5:5 says that God pours out (same Greek word) his love onto us. The two texts describe the same experience.
that your awareness of your unloveliness is precisely why you qualify to experience Ephesians 3 and the endless love of Christ.
Your life doesn’t disprove Christ’s love; his life proves it.
Do you realize how God treats his children who mistreat his love? He loves them all the fiercer.
the gospel is not a hotel to pass through but a home to live in.
why: the process of sanctification is, in large part, fed by constant returning, ever more deeply, to the event of justification.
That ticket got him on but is also what is needed to keep him on the train.
we are justified by being given a right standing that comes to us from wholly outside us.
12). But the commands of the Bible are the steering wheel, not the engine, to your growth.
slather rules onto our behavior and think that external behavior is what fosters, or even accurately reflects, vital spiritual growth.
Apparently being a lover of self can look like godliness.
But the Bible teaches that healthy spiritual growth takes place only when such commands land on those who know they are accepted and safe irrespective of the degree to which they successfully keep those commands.
we grow by going deeper into the justification that forgave us in the first place.
opposite. Our fallen hearts are spring-loaded to assess our justified state on the basis of how our sanctification is going.
sins) does not carry with it the permission or license to sin
enkindle the desire of piety and the practice of holiness.
self-established standing before God in the divine courtroom.
generally the root issue is that we have allowed ourselves imperceptibly to slide away from a heart grasp of the doctrine of justification.
make: These are justification questions. Idolatry is simply pseudo justification.
asking a created thing rather than the Creator to render a verdict over me.
the first commandment is in essence a call to justification by faith; that is, justification by God.
horizontal.
that just as a body grows and matures, Christians are to grow and mature:
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another,
Walking in the light in this text is honesty with other Christians.
walking in the light is confessing our sinfulness, and walking in the darkness is hiding our sinfulness.
You are restricting your growth if you do not move through life doing the painful, humiliating, liberating work of cheerfully bringing your failures out from the darkness of secrecy into the light of acknowledgment before a Christian brother or sister.
explicit dishonesty and implicit dishonesty.
self-projection that gives an appearance of moral success when the truth is far different.
Is there someone in your life who knows you are a sinner not only generally but also specifically?
Walking in the light breeds depth of communion with fellow Christians.
We pant for a bonded spirit with others, for shared hearts, for togetherness.
The category of “cleansing,” however, makes its own contribution.
“un-dirty-able.” It doesn’t matter what you feel.
When you trust God enough to speak your sinfulness to another human, the channels of your heart are opened to feeling forgiven.
the same pride that stops us from confessing our sins to a brother or sister also hinders our felt belief in the gospel.
however, that pain is a means, not an obstacle, to deepening in Christian maturity.
