Tag: gospel for believers

Reminding Ourselves of the Cross

~ fundyreformed ~ 1 Comment

Sunday Mediations — posts encouraging us all to meditate on the things of our Savior, on His day.

The Gospel isn’t just for those who are outside of Christianity. Christians must remind themselves and others of the beauty of the Gospel, day in and day out. This is how we live. We need the Gospel.

Listen to C.J. Mahaney (of Sovereign Grace Ministries) in a recent post on the importance of preaching the gospel to ourselves:

We awaken each day with a tendency to forget that which is most important: the gospel. All of us should assume this tendency and be aware of this tendency. Because of the Fall and due to the effects of remaining sin, we have a daily tendency and temptation to forget stuff in general and to forget that which is most important in particular.

Assuming this tendency, we must create practices that will enable us to remember what we must not forget””the cross. So each day I seek to spend time in a location where I am not distracted, unhurriedly reading and meditating on Scripture and finding my way in Scripture to a hill called Calvary to meditate each day on Christ and him crucified. Each day I need to remind myself of the gospel. I cannot live on yesterday’s recollection of the gospel. I need to review and rehearse the gospel each day or I will assume the gospel, forget the gospel, and prove vulnerable to all manner of temptation and sin.

Take these words to heart. And for some great book recommendations, read the rest of C.J. Mahaney’s post.

You NEVER Outgrow Your Need for the Gospel

~ fundyreformed ~ 2 Comments

I would highly recommend that you listen to my pastor’s (John Piper) recent sermon “God Strengthens Us by the Gospel”. You can read it here, as well as find links to watch or listen to it online or even to download it.  

The text for the message is Rom. 16:25-27.

Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith”” to the only wise God be glory forevermore through Jesus Christ! Amen.

Piper sees the main point of this passage being that God strengthens us according to the gospel. And the gospel was given according to preaching and revelation of the mystery through  prophetic  writings, and was given according to the command of God, and the gospel was given to bring obedience of faith.    

Piper saw something  incredibly striking in all of this. The passage ends  Romans and is a typical doxology. That means that something about God is  said to be glorious and worthy of praise. The thing  (of all  of God’s attributes  or actions) that  Paul chose to stress at the end of arguably the greatest letter ever written, is that God strengthens us through the Gospel. Piper saw this as stating something great about God. Other dictators and kings become great by walking on the backs of those they govern. They glory in being stronger than others and in holding them down.

But God is so much greater  than that. He glorifies Himself by strengthening those whom He governs. He is big enough that He does not have to fear competition and advance His cause by humbling his own subjects. God strengthens His people, and that indeed is glorious, and an amazing grace we are so unworthy of!

Then Piper makes the obvious point, that Paul considers the gospel to be central to life as a Christian. It is not merely a “ticket to Heaven”, that once acquired you can drop in your pocket and forget about. No it is much more than that. Piper said,

You never, never, never outgrow your need for this gospel. You don’t begin the Christian life with this and then leave it behind and get stronger with something else. God strengthens us with the gospel to the day we die.

If you listen to the sermon, you will see that Piper adds about four or five more “never”s in that statement: “You never, never, never, never, never, never, never, NEVER, outgrow your need for this gospel.” The gospel is to fuel our worship and be ever in front of us as we come to God for acceptance. All of our works should flow from the gospel, and not be separate from its impact. This is the heart of gospel-centeredness. The gospel is what strengthens us. (Take the time to look up Acts 20:32 in this regard.)

Finally, I want to encourage you to follow this series. There are four more messages on this paragraph. One of them, I am sure, will delve into the fact that now the mystery of Christ is revealed in the prophetic Scriptures (the OT, as far as I can tell). That part, to me, is a justification for the redemptive historical hermeneutical approach to Scripture. But that is for another post.

(P.S. I wanted to beat John Chitty to posting on this sermon! I am sure that he will have a post on it soon, as “gospel centeredness” is the main theme of his blog.)

Preaching the Gospel to Ourselves

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

Recently there have been some good comments here, concerning the importance of encouraging others and ourselves with the Gospel. Under my brief post about C.J. Mahaney’s sermon on Encouragement at Bethlehem (my church), Alana Asby Roberts wrote:

That thought about speaking the gospel to other Christians is interesting. After my “new” and final conversion experience at nineteen, I found that I enjoyed the gospel as food, loved to sing its truths, etc.

When we got a new pastor, he began by preaching his first Sunday morning series on “The Nature of Saving Faith” and was going deep into the truths, usually neglected, of the full gospel. He abruptly switched, I am sad to say, to a series about the Ten Commandments (with all of their possible ‘applications’). We later found out that people had been complaining about having to listen to all these “salvation messages” when they were already “saved”.

But it is the gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ. What could be more edifying or encouraging? He comes to us in it again and again, no matter how long we have been walking in the Way.

And under the comments for my post on “The Gospel Song” , Capt. Headknowledge said:

Mahaney’s book [The Cross Centered Life] helped me realize I can preach the Gospel to myself when I find I’m going without it in my own “worship experience.”

Sadly, Alana’s experience is all too common, and Capt. Headknowledge’s discovery isn’t. Believers do not want to have the gospel preached at them, so of course they don’t preach it to themselves! The Gospel is just for the lost (they say), and of course once they pray the sinner’s prayer, then all is good and well, right?

The ESV and other modern versions capture the essence of the Greek of 1 Cor. 1:18 better than the old KJV. It says:

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (emphasis added)

Salvation is in one sense a process. The common expression “whoever believes will be saved” in most of its occurences could be understood as “the believing ones will be saved”, based on the literal sense of the Greek. Belief commences when we convert to Christ but it is to continue our whole lives [see this post which emphasizes that]. And belief is nurtured through hearing the word of God (Rom. 10:17). And the phrase “word of God” most often in the NT refers to the gospel message of Christ–“the word of the cross”.

John Piper in his book When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy encourages us to preach the Gospel to ourselves!

We must not rely only on being preached to, but must become good preachers to our own soul. The gospel is the power of God to lead us joyfully to final salvation, if we preach it to ourselves. (emphasis in the original)

Piper points out that Martin Lloyd-Jones emphasized this truth in his book Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures. The book is…

“an exposition of Psalm 42, especially verse 5: ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted in me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance’ (KJV).”

Piper and Lloyd-Jones point out that the psalmist is preaching the promises of the Gospel to himself. I will end with just a quote Piper gives from Lloyd-Jones and then point you to Piper’s book pgs 80-82 (and also 88-89) which is available online for free here. Lloyd-Jones, then will conclude this post for us:

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself….You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condmn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: “Hope thou in God”–instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way, and then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and…what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: “I shall yet praise Him for the help of his countenance, who is also the health of my coutenance and my God.” [Ps. 42:11b, KJV]

[For my treatment of how the Gospel should be the focus of each and every public sermon in church, see here]