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The living God is so glorious and kind, he cannot be known without being adored.
Growing in Christ is not centrally improving or adding or experiencing but deepening.
Christian growth is bringing what you do and say and even feel into line with what, in fact, you already are.
“real change for real sinners,”
One of the devil’s great victories is to flood our hearts with a sense of futility. Perhaps his greatest victory in your life is not a sin you are habitually committing but simply a sense of helplessness as to real growth.
Growing in Christ is a relational, not a formulaic, experience.
Let me suggest that you consider the possibility that your current mental idea of Jesus is the tip of the iceberg. That there are wondrous depths to him, realities about him, still awaiting your discovery.
When Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, he named the natives “Indians,” thinking he had reached what Europeans of the time referred to as “the Indies” (China, Japan, and India). In fact he was nowhere close to South or East Asia. In his path were vast regions of land, unexplored and uncharted, of which Columbus knew nothing. He assumed the world was smaller than it was. Have we made a similar mistake with regard to Jesus Christ? Are there vast tracts of who he is, according to biblical revelation, that are unexplored?
Have we been looking at a junior varsity, decaffeinated, one-dimensional Jesus of our own making, thinking we’re looking at the real Jesus?
Have you treated what is spiritually nuclear as a double-A battery? Might one reason we stall out in our growth in Christ be that we have unwittingly domesticated the expansive authority and rule of Jesus Christ over all things? Might we be lacking an appropriate fear of, wonder at, trembling before, the Lord Jesus, the real Jesus who will one day silence the raging of the nations with a moment’s whisper?
this is a Savior who draws near to us, who is repelled only by self-righteousness but never by acknowledged shame and weakness, there is no limit to just how deep a transformation is possible in us.
we cannot sin our way out of the grip of Jesus.
Jesus left this earth quietly, but he will return loudly (1 Thess. 4:16). He slipped away; but he will come roaring back. It may be tomorrow. Even if not, we’re one day closer.
He is the most open and accessible, the most peaceful and accommodating person in the universe. He is the gentlest, least abrasive person you will ever experience. Infinite strength, infinite meekness. Dazzlingly resplendent; endlessly calm.
when Jesus opens himself up and tells us of the fountain, the engine, the throbbing core of all that he does, he says that deeper than anything else, he is gentle and lowly. Peer down into the deepest recesses of Jesus Christ and there we find: gentleness and lowliness. We who know our hearts resist this. We see the ugliness within. We can hardly face ourselves, we feel so inadequate. And Jesus is perfectly holy, the divine Son of God. It is normal and natural, even in our churches, to sense instinctively that he is holding his people at arm’s length. This is why we need a Bible. The testimony
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Here is the teaching of the Bible: If you are in Christ, your sins cause that stockpile to grow all the more. Where sins abound, his grace superabounds. It is in your pockets of deepest shame and regret that his heart dwells and won’t leave.
Make your growth journey a journey into Christ himself. Explore uncharted regions of who he is. Resist the tendency we all have to whittle him down to our preconceived expectation of what he must be like. Let him surprise you. Let his fullness arrest you and buoy you along. Let him be a big Christ.
You are on the right track now: getting to the real Man behind all the plaster dolls that have been substituted for Him. This is the appearance in Human form of the God who made the Tiger and the Lamb, the avalanche and the rose. He’ll frighten and puzzle you: but the real Christ can be loved and admired as the doll can’t.4
The Psalms tell us that those whose hearts are breaking and who feel crushed by life are the people God is closest to (Ps. 34:18). Proverbs tells us it is to the low and the destitute that God shows favor (Prov. 3:34). In Isaiah we are surprised to learn that God dwells in two places: way up high, in the glory of heaven, and way down low, with those void of self-confidence and empty of themselves (Isa. 57:15; 66:1–2). Jesus tells us that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). He tells us that the way to
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no man can be thoroughly humbled until he knows that his salvation is utterly beyond his own powers, devices, endeavors, will, and works, and depends entirely on the choice, will, and work of another, namely, of God alone.
we who confess Christ quickly concede the reality of sin. But we profoundly underplay it.
The old British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones explains: “You will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner, because there is a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good terms with ourselves, and we can always put up a good case for ourselves.”
It’s like we have a disease, one symptom of which is that we feel healthy.
“Learn much of your own heart,” wrote the Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne, “and when you have learned all you can, remember you have seen but a few yards into a pit that is unfathomable.”3
Christian salvation is not assistance. It is rescue. The gospel does not take our good and complete us with God’s help; the gospel tells us we are dead and helpless, unable to contribute anything to our rescue but the sin that requires it. Christian salvation is not enhancing. It is resurrecting.
One reason some Christians remain shallow their whole lives is they do not allow themselves, ever more deeply throughout their lives, to pass through the painful corridor of honesty about who they really are.
You cannot feel the weight of your sinfulness strongly enough. I never met a deep Christian who did not have a correspondingly deep sense of his or her own natural desolation.
“The index of the soundness of a man’s faith in Christ,” writes J. I. Packer, “is the genuineness of the self-despair from which it springs.”9
Repentance is turning from Self. Faith is turning to Jesus. You can’t have one without the other. Repentance that does not turn to Jesus is not real repentance; faith that has not first turned from Self is not real faith.
Paul said not “I was converted by faith” but “I live by faith” (Gal. 2:20). We do not merely begin the Christian life by faith; we progress by faith. It is our new normal.
The New Testament refers to our being united to Christ over two hundred times. That averages out to about one reference per page in many Bible layouts. If a book loops back to the same theme on every page, wouldn’t you consider it a major point the author intends to get across?
I am united to Christ. I can never be disunited from him. The logic of the New Testament letters is that in order for me to get disunited from Christ, Christ himself would have to be de-resurrected. He’d have to get kicked out of heaven for me to get kicked out of him. We’re that safe.
To be in Christ, then, in this macro or cosmic or federal way, is for our destiny to be bound up with his rather than with Adam’s.
When you sin, you behave out of accord with who you now are. You’re acting like a former orphan who’s been adopted yet keeps running out of his new house to the curb to beg for bread when the kitchen is fully stocked and freely his.
Your salvation in the gospel is far deeper, far more wondrous, than walking an aisle or praying a prayer or raising a hand or going forward at an evangelistic rally. Your salvation is to be united to the living Christ himself. It is, as Scougal wrote, “a union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature.”7
Ponder the rich variety of ways the New Testament speaks of our rescue in Christ.
If you are in Christ, you get all these benefits. It’s all or nothing. This is why Paul says that because of God’s saving work “you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30).
nothing can touch you that does not touch him. To get to you, every pain, every assault, every disappointment has to go through him. You are shielded by invincible love. Everything that washes into your life, no matter how hard, comes from and through the tender care of the friend of sinners.
You have heard of divine love. But now you need to see it. And spend a lifetime seeing it ever more deeply, ever more expansively. Your vision of the love of God needs to be not just heard but seen; not just known but tasted.
We grow in Christ no further than we enjoy his embrace of us.
(Eph. 3:16–19) If we were to pray that reality into our lives and into our churches, what story would we be telling from heaven? What exactly is Paul praying for? Not for greater obedience among the Ephesians, or that they would be more fruitful, or that false teaching would be stamped out, or that they would grow in doctrinal depth, or even for the spread of the gospel. All good things, things we should and must pray for. But here 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,
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it is Christ’s love itself that is expansive in its “breadth and length and height and depth.” This is striking because only one other reality in the universe is boundless, endless, without limits—God himself.
“His essence being love,” Jonathan Edwards preached, “he is as it were an infinite ocean of love without shores and bottom, yea, and without a surface.”
The love of Christ is a love next to which every human romance is the faintest whisper.
Who are we—weak, faltering, mixed-motives we—to be filled up with the very fullness of God himself? How can the clay be filled with the fullness of the potter, the plant with the fullness of the gardener, the house with the architect? What breathtaking condescension, what astounding dignifying of us.
Every heart-stabbing poem, every story of rescue, every novel that evokes longings, every reading of Tolkien and Wendell Berry and John Donne and a thousand others who make the tears flow—all are an echo of the love behind all of human history. This love is the power that burst the created order into existence, and most supremely you, the pinnacle of creation. He created you in order to love you. He knit you together with his hands so that he could pull you into his heart.
John Owen. Here’s what Owen says about the connection between our growth in grace and the love of God: So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more. Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from him; but if the heart be once much taken up with this the eminency of the Father’s love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared unto him. . . . If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will?5
It’s precisely our messiness that makes Christ’s love so surprising, so startling, so arresting—and thereby so transforming.
Let him love you all over again. Pick yourself up off the ground, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and allow his heart to plunge you into his oceanic love more deeply than he ever has before.
you who are in Christ have never stepped outside the cascading waterfall of divine love. God would have to un-God himself for that deluge to run dry. You have muted your experience of his love. But you cannot stop the flow any more than a single pebble can slow Victoria Falls, a mile across and 360 feet high, as those millions of gallons of the Zambezi River come crashing over the cliffs there in southern Zambia.
