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THIS short book is meant to lay out the essentials of the Christian message, the gospel.
one of the signs that you may not grasp the unique, radical nature of the gospel is that you are certain that you do. Sometimes longtime church members find themselves so struck and turned around by a fresh apprehension of the Christian message that they feel themselves to have been essentially “re-converted.”
The targets of this story are not “wayward sinners” but religious people who do everything the Bible requires.
He is on the side of neither the irreligious nor the religious, but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly deadly spiritual condition.
when Christianity first arose in the world it was not called a religion. It was the non-religion.
To most people in our society, Christianity is religion and moralism.
There are many commentators who, focusing exclusively on Act 1, conclude that this parable contradicts traditional Christian doctrine. “Look,” they say, “there is no mention of atonement for sin. There’s no need for a savior on a cross that pays for sin. God is a God of universal love who unconditionally accepts everyone, no matter what.”
If, like the elder brother, you believe that God ought to bless you and help you because you have worked so hard to obey him and be a good person, then Jesus may be your helper, your example, even your inspiration, but he is not your Savior. You are serving as your own Savior.
Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don’t obey God to get God himself—in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight him.
Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.
The first thing we need is God’s initiating love.
If we read the narrative in light of the Bible’s sweeping theme of exile and homecoming we will understand that Jesus has given us more than a moving account of individual redemption. He has retold the story of the whole human race, and promised nothing less than hope for the world.
The houses and families we actually inhabit are only inns along the way, but they aren’t home. Home continues to evade us.
That was our original home, the true country we were made for.
The Bible says that we have been wandering as spiritual exiles ever since. That is, we have been living in a world that no longer fits our deepest longings.
The message of the Bible is that the human race is a band of exiles trying to come home.
brokenness within human beings.
brokenness around human beings.
but to save all of us from sin, evil, and death itself. He came to bring the human race Home.
Salvation Is Experiential
If you are filled with worry and anxiety, you do not only need to believe that God is in control of history. You must see, with eyes of the heart, his dazzling majesty. Then you will know he has things in hand.
Salvation Is Material
the ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering, and death. The climax of history is not a higher form of disembodied consciousness but a feast. God made the world with all its colors, tastes, lights, sounds, with all its life-forms living in interdependent systems. It is now marred, stained, and broken, and he will not rest until he has put it right.
Jesus’s miracles were not so much violations of the natural order, but a restoration of the natural order. God did not create a world with blindness, leprosy, hunger, and death in it. Jesus’s miracles were signs that someday all these corruptions of his creation would be abolished.
Salvation Is Individual
Religion operates on the principle of “I obey—therefore I am accepted by God.” The basic operating principle of the gospel is “I am accepted by God through the work of Jesus Christ—therefore I obey.”
A fundamental insight of Martin Luther’s was that “religion” is the default mode of the human heart.
We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.
What makes you faithful or generous is not just a redoubled effort to follow moral rules. Rather, all change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out of the changes that understanding creates in your heart.
But if you remove this fear and talk so much about free grace and unmerited acceptance—what incentive will you have to live a good life?
But if, when you have lost all fear of punishment you also have lost incentive to live an obedient life, then what was your motivation in the first place? It could only have been fear. What other incentive is there? Awed, grateful love.
but to focus on how seriously God takes sin and on how he could only save us from it at infinite cost to himself.
“We are saved by faith alone [not our works], but not by faith that remains alone.”
But if we truly believe and trust in the one who sacrificially served us, it changes us into people who sacrificially serve God and our neighbors.
Salvation Is Communal
Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald
