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Growing in Christ is not centrally improving or adding or experiencing but deepening. Implicit in the notion of deepening is that you already have what you need. Christian growth is bringing what you do and say and even feel into line with what, in fact, you already are.
but real change occurs through this reality: the life of God in the soul of man.
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.
he is a person. Not just a historical figure, but an actual person, alive and well today. He is to be related to. Trusted, spoken to, listened to. Jesus is not a concept. Not an ideal. Not a force. Growing in Christ is a relational, not a formulaic, experience.
seven facets of Christ,
ruling, saving, befriending, persevering, interceding, returning, and tenderness.
Jesus exercises supreme authority over the entire universe.
The world’s sidelining of his authority does nothing to reflect the reality of that authority.
Subtract Jesus from the universe, and everything falls apart.
He is not a bobblehead Savior, to be smiled at and merely added to an otherwise well-oiled life.
his work that he is doing right now: birth → life → death → burial → resurrection → ascension → intercession.
In your smallness, he notices you. In your sinfulness, he draws near to you. In your anguish, he is in solidarity with you.
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
Fallen human beings enter into joy only through the door of despair. Fullness can be had only through emptiness. That happens decisively at conversion, as we confess our hopelessly sinful predicament for the first time and collapse into the arms of Jesus, and then remains an ongoing rhythm throughout the Christian life. If you are not growing in Christ, one reason may be that you have drifted out of the salutary and healthy discipline of self-despair.
Evil is the ocean, not the islands, of our internal existence.
“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.”
Christian salvation is not assistance. It is rescue.
Repentance is turning from Self. Faith is turning to Jesus. You can’t have one without the other.
The Christian life is one of repenting our way forward
The Devil can be pretty tricky. He doesn’t mind you thinking much about repentance and faith if you do not think about Jesus Christ.
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.
“As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”
Christian growth is an enterprise not mainly in adding but in deepening.
Divine love is inherently spreading, engulfing, embracing, overflowing.
the kind that only God himself can give, power to know how much Jesus loves them. Not just to have the love of Christ. To know the love of Christ.
The Christian life is indeed one of toil and labor. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a false teacher.
“Christ is love covered over with flesh.”
We experience the love of God as we look at Jesus and God pours the Holy Spirit, who is himself divine love, into our felt experience.
it is this experience that uglifies sin in our eyes and beautifies righteousness. It is this experience that takes us deeper into communion with God. It is this experience that uproots sin.
It’s precisely our messiness that makes Christ’s love so surprising, so startling, so arresting—and thereby so transforming.
Your suffering does not define you. His does. You have endured pain involuntarily. He has endured pain voluntarily, for you. Your pain is meant to push you to flee to him where he endured what you deserve.
1. Justification is outside-in, and we lose it if we make it inside-out. 2. Sanctification is inside-out, and we lose it if we make it outside-in. 3. And this inside-out sanctification is largely fed by daily appropriation of this outside-in justification.
True sanctification, true growth in holiness, is internal. It will manifest itself on the outside;
The internal realities of the Christian are what define true growth in Christ.
we grow by going deeper into the justification that forgave us in the first place.
idolatry, which is the flip side to justification by faith.
All of this world’s fraudulent pseudo justifications are shiny on the outside but only bring misery when attained. They are like baited fish hooks: when bit down on, they only bring pain.
Do you want to grow in Christ? Never graduate beyond the gospel. Move ever deeper into the gospel. The freeness of your outside-in justification is a critical ingredient to fostering your inside-out sanctification.
Pride hinders fellowship both horizontally and vertically.
The New Testament tells us again and again, however, that pain is a means, not an obstacle, to deepening in Christian maturity.
“Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.”
In killing sin we are not completing Christ’s finished work; we are responding to it.
There is no special technique to mortifying sin. You simply open your Bible and let God surprise you each day with the wonder of his love, proven in Christ and experienced in the Spirit.
God will not let you go. He will be sure to love you on into heaven.
Reading the Bible is inhaling. Praying is exhaling.
But the Bible is different from other books in the way rainfall is different from your garden hose—it comes from above and provides a kind of nourishment far beyond what our own resources can provide.
The right way to read the Bible is the gospel approach. This means we read every passage as somehow contributing to the single, overarching storyline of Scripture, which culminates in Jesus
the Christian life is at heart a matter not of doing more or behaving better but of going deeper.
The Bible is God’s speaking to us; prayer is our speaking to him. If we do not pray, we do not believe God is an actual person.
To be sure, planned times of focused prayer are indispensable. But if that is all we ever do—if our only prayer all day long is a segmented couple of minutes praying through a list of items—we do not know him as Father.
