vnss’s Reviews > The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith > Status Update

“Jesus tells us that both the sensual way of the younger brother and the ethical way of the elder brother are spiritual dead ends. He also shows us there is another way: through him. And to enter that way and to live a life based on his salvation will bring us finally to the ultimate party and feast at the end of history.”

“In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest.”

Bonhoeffer warned about the dangers of the teaching that stresses only that grace is free, so it doesn’t matter how we live.
Focus on how seriously God takes sin and on how he could only save us from it at infinite cost to himself.
This must and will deeply reshape us. We won’t be able to live selfishly. “We won’t mind the cost of following after Christ when we compare it to the price he paid to rescue us.”

In order to grow in Christ, you keep telling yourself how graciously loved and accepted you are.
It doesn’t seem to be the best way to make progress? Wonder what incentive will you have to live a good life?
Then ask what was your motivation in the first place? It could only have been fear. What other incentive is there? Awed, grateful love.
God’s grace is free, but it is also costly, infinitely so. (Bonhoeffer)

Paul didn’t put pressure directly on the will or on the emotions, telling them stories about how much the poor are suffering and how much more they have. Instead, he says, “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). Paul is taking them back to the gospel.

In order to survive and grow, individuals must eat and drink regularly. That’s what we must do with the gospel of the grace of God. We must personally appropriate it, making it more and more central to everything we see, think, and feel. That is how we grow spiritually in wisdom, love, joy, and peace.

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. Christians therefore can talk of saving the soul and of building social systems that deliver safe streets and warm homes in the same sentence. With integrity.

Jesus secures the legal verdict “not guilty” for us so we are no longer liable for our wrongdoings. However, salvation is not only objective and legal but also subjective and experiential. The Bible insists on using sensory language about salvation. It calls us to “taste and see” that the Lord is good, not only to agree and believe it.

“Jesus had not come to simply deliver one nation from political oppression, but to save all of us from sin, evil, and death itself. He came to bring the human race Home. (…) He came and experienced the exile that we deserved. He was expelled from the presence of the Father in our place. He took upon himself the full curse of human rebellion, cosmic homelessness, so that we could be welcomed into our true home”.

“All the mini-exoduses and mini-homecomings of the Bible failed in the end to deliver the final and full homecoming the prophets promised and everyone longed for”
1. The brokenness within human beings. “We are oppressed by conflicts within our own hearts”
2. The brokenness around human beings. “We were not made for a world (…) in which everything decays and dies, including ourselves”