Notes on *Deeper*

[Editor’s note: Deeper is my favorite I’ve read this year. I found it profoundly encouraging, repeatedly leading me to worship.]

Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners, Dane Ortlund (Crossway, 2021)

Main Idea/Takeaway

The way that Christians grow- or progress in sanctification- is not by putting their heads to work, but by opening their hands to receive all that God is for us in Christ. We must keep our eyes on Jesus.

• "The basic point of this book is that change is a matter of going deeper. Some believers think change happens through outward improvement-behaving more and more in accord with some moral norm (the biblical law, or the commands of Jesus, or conscience, or whatever). Others chink change happens mainly through intellectual addition--understanding doctrine with greater breadth and precision. Others think it comes centrally through felt experience-  sensory increase as we worship God. My argument is that all three of these elements are included in healthy Christian development (and if any is missing, we are out of proportion and will not grow), but real growth transcends them all.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." (16)

• " The primary emphasis I have wanted to give is that we grow specifically by going deeper into the gospel, into the love of Christ and our experienced union with him." (153)

• "My goal in this book has simply been to coach you into that single, simple, all-determining impulse of the heart: looking to Jesus. If you look to him, everything else is footnotes." (172)

• "This is a book with one point: Be astonished at the gracious heart of Jesus Christ, proven in his atoning work in the past and his endless intercession in the present. Receive his unutterable love for sinners and sufferers. Stop resisting. Let him draw near to you. Gaze upon him." (173)

Table of Contents

I. Jesus

II. Despair

III. Union

IV. Embrace 

V.  Acquittal 

VI. Honesty

VII. Pain 

VIII. Breathing 

IX. Supernaturalized 

Conclusion: What now?

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

I. Jesus

• "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." (22)

• "This supreme reign holds true not only for the cosmos and for world history but also for your own little life. He sees you. He knows you. Nothing is hid from his gaze. You will be judged one day not according to what was visible to others but according to what you really were and did." (24)

• "Have you reduced the Lord Jesus to a safe, containable, predictable Savior who pitches in and helps out your otherwise smoothly running existence? 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?" (25)

• "And in our ongoing walk with the Lord now, do we functionally believe that the healthy Christian life is basically a matter of our efforts, baptized with a little extra push from Jesus?" (25)

• "Every human is five hundred denarii in debt. The point of the parable is that we tend to feel only fifty denarii in debt. The more obvious failures of a given culture sense their sinfulness more readily than others and are therefore readier and more eager for a deliverance that sweeps them up out of death with a full and total salvation." (27)

• "But if 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. It is at our point of deepest guilt and regret that his friendship embraces us most assuredly, most steadfastly." (28)

• "We will not grow in Christ if we view his presence and favor as a ticking clock, ready for an alarm to go off once we fail him enough. We can flourish into deeper health only as the truth settles over us that once Jesus has brought us to himself, he will never be looking for an off-ramp. He will stick by us to the end. In that knowledge we calm down and begin to flourish." (29)

• "Jesus is not bored in heaven. He is fully engaged on our behalf, as engaged as ever he was on earth. He is interceding for us. Why? Because we continue to sin as believers. If conversion so changed us that we never sinned again, we would not need Christ's intercessory work. We would only need his death and resurrection to pay for our pre-conversion sins. But he is a comprehensive Savior. His present intercessory work applies his past atoning work moment-by-moment before the Father as we move through life desiring to please the Lord but often failing." (31)

• "We will grow in Christ only as we recognize the ally Jesus Christ is to us, now in heaven. He did not die and rise again on our behalf back then only to stand now with arms crossed seeing how we'll do in response. He continues to work on our behalf-he goes "to the uttermost" for us--advocating for us when no one else will, not even we ourselves. He is more committed to your growth in him than you are." (31)

• "Our growth in Christ also draws strength from a vivid heart sense of his imminent return. It is hard to move forward in the Christian life if we allow ourselves to be lulled into the monotonous sense that this world will simply roll on forever as it currently is." (31)

• "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." (32)

• "Peer down into the deepest recesses of Jesus Christ and there we find: gentleness and lowliness." (33)

• "What we must see is not only that Jesus is gentle toward you but that he is positively drawn toward you when you are most sure he doesn't want to be." (33)

• "Determine today, before God, through the Bible and good books explaining it, that you will spend the rest of your life wading into the unsearchable riches of the real Christ." (35)

II. Despair

• "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." (38)

• "Christian growth is, among other things, growth in sensing just how impoverished and powerless we are in our own strength- that is, just how hollow and futile our efforts to grow spiritually are on our own steam." (39)

• "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." (40)

• "To the degree that we minimize the evil within, we lower the ceiling on how deeply we can grow. We take a painkiller and go to sleep when we think we have a headache; we undergo chemotherapy when we know we have a brain tumor. The severity of our condition dictates the depth and seriousness of the medicine we know we need. If you view your sinfulness as a bothersome headache more than a lethal cancer, you will see tepid growth, if any. You won't see yourself as needing to grow all that much." (40)

• "When we see how desperately sick we are and how profoundly short we fall of the glory for which God intended us, we have already taken the first decisive step in bridging that vast gulf between who we are and who we were made to be." (41)

• "The point in all this is chat we must come face-to-face with who we

  really are, left to our own steam. 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." (42)

• "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." (43)

• "The pattern of the Christian life is not a straight line up to resurrection existence but a curve down into death and thereby up into resurrection existence.? And one thing that means is that we go through life with an ever-deepening sense of how reprehensible, in ourselves, we really are." (44)

• "If you plunge down only a little into self-despair, you will rise only a little into joyous growth in Christ. "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." (45)

• "Healthy despair is an intersection, not a highway; a gateway, not a pathway.

  We must go there. But we dare not stay there. The Bible teaches, rather, that each experience of despair is to melt us afresh into deeper fellowship with Jesus." (47)

• “As you despair of yourself agonizing over the desolation wrought by your failures, your weaknesses, your inadequacies- let that despair take you way down deep into honesty with yourself. For there you will find a friend, the living Lord Jesus himself, who will startle and surprise you with his gentle goodness as you leave Self behind, in repentance, and bank on him afresh, in faith.” (49)

III. Union

• "The old writer Jeremiah Burroughs put it this way: "From Christ as from a fountain sanctification flows into the souls of the saints: their sanctification comes not so much from their struggling, and endeavors, and vows, and resolutions, as it comes flowing to them from their union with him." (51-52)

• "When Jesus went down into the grave to die for our sins, we too went with him down into that grave to die to our sins." (52)

• "This fourth approach is "God in me." God does everything to save me, and then by his Holy Spirit (more on that in another chapter) he unites me spiritually to his Son. The result is that in our growth in holiness (as Edwards put it) "we are not merely passive in it, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest, but God does all, and we do all. . .. We are in different respects wholly passive and wholly active." This approach, in other words, holds together both human responsibility and divine sovereignty in how we move forward spiritually." (54)

• "Our Christian growth takes place in the sphere of a wonderful inevitability, even invincibility. I am united to Christ. I can never be disunited from him." (56)

• "The New Testament uses the language of union with Christ in basically two ways. We could call them the macro and the micro realities to union with Christ, or the cosmic and the intimate, or the federal and the personal." (57)

• "The alternative to being in Christ is to be in Adam. One or the other. No third option.

  Every human being alive today is either in Adam or in Christ. And that is the fundamental defining reality about each of us." (58)

• "To be united to Christ as your new federal head is to be placed in that new realm. If you are a Christian, you have been swept up by divine grace into the new order that the prophets foretold. The new creation has already begun to dawn." (59)

• "The glory of Christian redemption is that it is in union with Jesus that we are given back our true selves. We finally begin becoming who we were truly created to be." (61)

• "At this point you may be wondering how union with Christ fits with the other great and glorious pictures of our salvation- justification, adoption, and so on. The answer is that union with Christ is the umbrella doctrine within which every benefit of salvation is subsumed. When we are united to Christ, we get all these benefits." (62)

• "And union with Christ, the organic or spatial metaphor, is the master-picture. If you are in Christ, you get all these benefits." (63)

• "If you are in Christ, you have everything you need to grow. You are united to Christ: by the Holy Spirit, you are in him and he is in you. He is your federal head, and he is your intimate companion. You cannot lose. You are inexhaustibly rich." (64)

• "Every atom in the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most to the advantage of the Christian, every particle of air or every ray of the sun; so that he in the other world, when he comes to see it, shall sit and enjoy all this vast inheritance with surprising, amazing joy." (65)

• "Therefore: 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. He himself feels your anguish even more deeply than you do, because you're one with him; and he mediates everything hard in your life through his love for you, because you're one with him. Picture yourself standing in a circle with an invisible but impenetrable wall surrounding you, a sphere of impregnability. But it's not a circle you're in. It's a person--the person. The one before whom John fell down as he grappled for words to describe what he was looking at as one whose "eyes were like a flame of fire ... and his voice was like the roar of many waters" (Rev. 1:14-15) has been made one with you. The might of heaven, the power that flung galaxies into existence, has swept you into himself." (66)

IV. Embrace 

• "What I want to say in this chapter is that the love of God is not something to see once and believe and then move beyond to other truths or strategies for growing in Christ. The love of God is what we feed on our whole lives long, wading ever more deeply into this endless ocean. And that feeding, that wading, is itself what fosters growth. We grow in Christ no further than we enjoy his embrace of us. His tender, mighty, irreversible embrace into his own divine heart." (70)

• "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, 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." (71)

• "Here in Ephesians 3, Paul is praying that believers would taste the love of Christ. Drink it down." (72)

• "The love of Christ is his settled, unflappable heart of affection for sinners and sufferers- and only sinners and sufferers. When Jesus loves, Jesus is Jesus." (72)

• "Paul is saying that the love of Christ is as expansive as God himself.

  We can underestimate it. We always do. We can never overestimate it. "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." (73)

• "And as this love of Christ becomes real to us not just something we assent to on paper, but vivid to us -we are, according to the Bible, "filled with all the fullness of God" (Eph. 3:19). With the possible exception of Colossians 2:9-10-_"in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him" -- this is, to me, the most astonishing claim in the Bible." (74)

• "Knowing Christ's love is the means, and being filled with divine fullness is the purpose. We are infused with divine plenitude, fullness, buoyancy, joy, as we experience the love of Christ. We don't go out and attain divine fullness. We receive it. This is the surprise of the Christian life. We get traction in our spiritual lives not centrally as we get down to work but as we open up our hands." (74)

• "But we cannot receive what God has to give when our fists are clenched and our eyes shut, concentrating on our own moral exertion. We need to open up our fists and our eyes and lift both heavenward to receive his love." (75)

• "And so what I want to say in this chapter is that your growth in Christ will go no further than your settledness, way down deep in your heart, that God loves you." (75)

• "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?" (76)

• "We tend to think we're in danger of overstating God's love for us as we receive it as his children. We hold back, not wanting to be too bold, careful to be sure we don't overdo it." (76)

• "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." (77)

• "...affections. By that they meant the felt inner enjoyment of the heart, the soul throb that only God gives, the joyous calm that blankets those who look upon him.

  And as we see more clearly the second person of the Trinity_-who he is and what he has done--the third person of the Trinity creates in us an experience of divine love." (77)

• " But where do we look to see Jesus so that the Holy Spirit can be poured afresh into our actual experience? We open a Bible." (78)

• "It's precisely our messiness that makes Christ's love so surprising, so startling, so arresting and thereby so transforming." (79)

• "Your life doesn't disprove Christ's love; his life proves it." (80)

• "The wraparound category of your life is not your performance but God's love. The defining hallmark of your life is not your cleanness but his embrace." (83)

V.  Acquittal 

• "And in this book on sanctification, this chapter is on justification. Sanctification is lifelong, gradual growth in grace. Justification, however, is not a process but an event, a moment in time, the verdict of legal acquittal once and for all." (85)

• "...the process of sanctification is, in large part, fed by constant returning, ever more deeply, to the event of justification." (86)

• "We could put the point of this chapter in three sentences:

  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." (86)

• "The great teachers of the past understood how heart-contrary we are to accepting wholesale the surprise of justification. This is why the Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne said, "For every one look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ." It's why John Newton said that a single view of Christ "will do you more good than poring over your own wounds for a month." (87)

• "Our growth in godliness, in other words, works in an inverse way to justification, both in how it works and in how it gets ruined. In our justification the verdict of legal acquittal must come wholly from heaven, landing on us as something earned by someone outside us, in no way helped out by our contribution. But that has to do with our standing. That is the objective result of the gospel. Sanctification, however, is change with regard to our walk, our personal holiness, the subjective result of the gospel. This must happen internally." (88)

• "Edward Fisher, in his famous Puritan treatise on sanctification, explained that external conformity to rules without an internal reality fueling it is akin to watering every part of a tree except its roots and expecting it to grow. The internal realities of the Christian are what define true growth in Christ." (90)

• "The gospel is what changes us, and only it can, because the gospel itself is telling us what is true of us before we ever begin to change, and no matter how slowly our change comes. (ln saying this I do not mean to collapse all that the gospel says into the one category of justification; the gospel is broader than justification, including other glorious doctrines such as adoption, reconciliation, redemption, and so on. But justification is the sharpest edge of the gospel because it is the doctrine where the sheer gratuity of the grace of the gospel stands forth most clearly.)" (91)

• "...in line with the broader point of this whole book: we grow by going deeper into the justification that forgave us in the first place." (91)

• "Richard Lovelace puts it in his classic work on spiritual renewal:

Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons--much less secure than non-Christians, because they have too much light to rest easily under the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have." (91)

• "Reformed stalwart Herman Bavinck defined real faith as a practical knowledge of the grace that God has revealed in Christ, a heartfelt trust that he has forgiven all our sins and accepted us as his children. For that reason this faith is not only needed at the beginning in justification, but it must also accompany the Christian throughout one's entire life, and also play a permanent and irreplaceable role in sanctification." (93)

• "Paul identified Peter's conduct as being out of step with the gospel (2:14) and in violation of the doctrine of justification by faith (2:16) because Peter had allowed the approval of people to erode his grasp of the approval that the gospel gives and the settled status that justification provides." (96)

• "What we all end to do is walk through life amassing a sense of r who we are as an aggregate of what we think everyone else think of us. We walk along, building a sense of self through all the feedback. pinging back at us. We don't even realize we're doing it. And when others are critical, or snub us, or ignore us, or ridicule us, that builds our sense of who we are. It inevitably shapes us. And so we muse constantly hold the gospel before our eyes. And as the gospel becomes real to us, the need for human approval loses its vice-like grip on our hearts, because we're no longer putting our heads down on our pillows at night medicating our sense of worth with human approval. The doctrine of justification frees us not only from the judgment of God in the future but also from the judgment of people in the present." (98)

• "Diagnostic questions to expose our idols are questions such as:

• What does my mind tend to drift back to when I lie awake in bed?

• What do I spend disposable income on?

• What in other people do I tend to envy?

• What is that one thing that, if God were to appear to me today and tell me I would never have it, would make life feel not worth living?

• If I'm married, what would my spouse say I tend to give myself to that makes him or her feel neglected?

• How would my heart--not my theology, but my heart--phrase the hymn, "When _________________it is well with my soul"?

• What do I find myself praying for that is nowhere promised in the Bible?" (100)

• "Every idol is man-made. Every false justification is generated by us. But God himself has come to us with a justification of his own doing. It is the atoning verdict of Jesus Christ. We can only receive it. To add to it is therefore to subtract from it. We simply breathe it in with a heart posture of trusting faith. And thereby God justifies us--God himself." (102)

• "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." (110)

VI. Honesty

• "I'd like to focus in this chapter on one particularly important teaching from the New Testament, the most important corporate reality for our growth in Christ: honesty." (112)

• "Walking in the light in this text is honesty with other Christians." (113)

• "Here is what I want to say in this chapter: You are restricting your growth if you do not move through life doing the painful, humiliating, liberating work of cheerfully bringing your failures out from the darkness of secrecy into the light of acknowledgment before a Christian brother or sister. In the darkness, your sins fester and grow in strength. In the light, they wither and die. Walking in the light, in other words, is honesty with God and others." (114)

• "Walking in the light breeds depth of communion with fellow Christians."(117)

• "The gospel answers that. If you are in Christ, heaven has bathed you.

  You have been rinsed clean and are now "un-dirty-able." It doesn't matter what you feel. That doesn't define you. Jesus was defiled to free you from your defiled status and your defiled feelings. That doesn't mean we will never battle feelings of defilement. But it does mean that one aspect of growing in Christ is bringing our subjective feelings of defilement into line with that objective, decisive, invincible, true-for-all-time-and-eternity cleansing in the blood of Christ." (122)

• "When you trust God enough to speak your sinfulness to another human, the channels of your heart are opened to feeling forgiven. This is because the same pride that stops us from confessing our sins to a brother or sister also hinders our felt belief in the gospel. Pride hinders fellowship both horizontally and vertically. Evading honesty before another Christian is more fundamentally a rejection of the gospel itself. Refusing to be honest with another is works righteousness in disguise; we are believing that we need to save face, to retain uprightness of appearance." (123)

VII. Pain 

• "Your natural instincts tell us that the way forward in the Christian life is by avoiding pain so that, undistracted, we can get down to the business at hand of growing in Christ. The New Testament tells us again and again, however, that pain is a means, not an obstacle, to deepening in Christian maturity." (125)

• "Misery and darkness and anguish and regret and shame and lament color all that we say, do, and think. The reality of nightmares shows that this pain and futility even reaches into our subconscious and our sleep. We can go nowhere to escape the futility and pain of life in this fallen world. This is true for all believers." (127)

• "Throughout the course of our discipleship to Christ we all need to build a deep and strong foundation of understanding how to process and even redeem the anguish of our lives. Without this foundation our growth in Christ will be severely limited." (128)

• "We who are honest with ourselves recognize how intractably entwined the vines of our hearts are with this world. That's not to say we should refuse to enjoy the good things of the world--a favorite meal, a beautiful sunset, the intimate pleasures of a spouse, gratification at a job well done. To resist such pleasures absolutely is, according to the apostles, demonic (1 Tim. 4:1-5). Rather, we should acknowledge that our hearts will latch on to anything in this world short of God himself and will seek to draw strength from that created thing instead of the Creator and his love.

  The biblical category for this perverse inclination of our hearts to look to the things of this world to quench our soul thirst is idolatry." (130)

• "When pain washes into our lives, we immediately, instinctively feel as if we are losing. Something is happening in the debit category. We are going backward. This is bad, we think. Understandably so. In the economy of the gospel, however, we are united to a Savior who was himself arrested, crucified, put in a grave, and left for dead, only to rise in a triumphant glory not possible apart from that death. Pain seeds glory?" (131)

• "When insults send us reeling backward, when life hurts, our eyes are being lifted off of the unstable things of the world onto the stable God of the Bible. We are being given back our true selves. We are being beckoned, as Lewis put it, "further up and further in.' When pain comes, it is not simply to hurt us, to teach us a lesson, to whip us into shape; it is from a tender Father, for our healing." (132)

• "When life hurts, we immediately find ourselves at an internal fork in the road. Either we take the road of cynicism, withdrawing from openheartedness with God and others, retreating into the felt safety of holding back our desires and longings, lest they get hurt again, or we press into greater depth with God than we have ever known." (132)

• "If you want to be a solid, weighty, radiant old man or woman someday, let the pain in your life force you to believe your own theology. Let it propel you into deeper fellowship with Christ than ever before. Don't let your heart dry up. He is in your pain. He is refining you. All that you will lose, Sibbes reminds us, is the dross of Self and misery that in your deepest heart you want to shed anyway." (133)

• "Let yourself cry as you grow. Don't stuff your emotions down. Growing in Christ isn't all smiles and laughter. Let your tears, and the wounds they reflect, take you deeper with Christ than you could ever otherwise go." (135)

• "Right now, every one of us who is in Christ is either killing sin or being killed by sin. Either getting stronger or getting weaker. If you think you're coasting, you're actually going backward. There's no cruise-control spiritually. It may feel as if you're currently in neutral, but our hearts are like gardens: if we aren't proactively rooting out the weeds, the weeds are growing, even if we don't notice." (135)

• "The trouble is that the whole message of the Bible is that if we're going to add a cherry of self-contribution on top of Christ's work to really be okay, we have to provide the whole sundae. All or nothing. And the tragedy is that though we assent theologically to the truth that we can't add to Christ's work, we try to put ourselves emotionally at ease by helping the Lord out a bit. Yet adding something to seal the deal is precisely what will create uneasiness about whether the deal ever really is sealed." (138)

• “Killing sin is a strange battle because it happens by looking away from the sin. By "looking away" I don't mean emptying our minds and trying to create a mental vacuum. I mean looking at Jesus Christ.” (139)

• "We feed sin by coddling it, pining after it, daydreaming about it, giving vent to it. We suffocate sin by redirecting our gaze to Christ.

  When I say "redirecting our gaze," I mean looking on him with "the eyes of your hearts" (Eph. 1:18)." (139)

• "But when our hearts redirect their gaze to the Jesus of the Bible in all his glorious gentleness and dazzling love, sin gets starved and begins to wilt. As we enjoy the truths this book has been reflecting on--realities such as our union with Christ and his unshakable embrace of us and God's irreversible acquittal of us--then, right then, spiritual life and vigor begin to have the ascendancy, and the grip of sin loosens."(140)

VIII. Breathing 

• "I want to consider just two ordinary, predictable, wondrous, vital practices: Bible reading and prayer. And the way to think about these two practices is by the metaphor of breathing. Reading the Bible is inhaling. Praying is exhaling." (143)

• "The Christian life-our growth in Christ--is nothing other than the lifelong deconstruction of what we naturally think and assume and the reconstruction of truth through the Bible." (145)

• “In this shifty, uncertain world, God has given us actual words, Concrete, unmoving, fixed words. We can go to the rock of Scripture amid the shifting sands of this life. Your Bible is going to have the same words tomorrow that it does today. Friends can't provide that-they will move in and out of your life, loyal today but absent tomorrow. Parents and their counsel will die. Your pastor will not always be available to take your call. The counselor who has given you such sage instruction will one day retire, or maybe you'll move out of state. But you can roll out of bed tomorrow morning and, whatever stressors slide uncomfortably across your mental horizon as you groan with the anxieties of the day, your friend the Bible is unfailingly steady. It lies there, awaiting opening, eager to steady you amid all the unanswered questions before you that day. It will give you what you need and not evade you. Our truest wisdom and only safety is to build our lives on its words (Matt. 7:24-27)” (146)

• "In fact, we should not be saying "it" but "he." Through Scripture God himself addresses us." (146)

• "Read the Bible asking not mainly whom to imitate and how to live but what it shows us about a God who loves to save and about sinners who need saving." (149)

• "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." (150)

• "Make the Bible your central daily ritual. Make it your habit without which you have not lived a normal day." (152)

• "As we now think about prayer, here is what we are doing; we are reflecting on the way our souls must go out to God in Christ to desire, to long for, to receive, to dwell in, to thank him for his endless love. The gospel comes to us in the Scriptures, and in prayer we receive and enjoy it?" (153)

• "...to connect prayer with Scripture reading is simply to acknowledge that God is a real person with whom believers have an actual, moment-by-moment relationship. 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. We may say we do. But we don't really. If we do not pray, we actually think he is an impersonal force of some kind, a kind of Platonic ideal, distant and removed, powerful but abstract. We don't view him as a Father." (153)

• "Move through your day praying. Let God be your moment-by-moment Father. Hear his voice in Scripture in the morning, and turn that Scripture into prayer and then let that time with him, that back-and-forth communion, send you off into your day communing with him all day long." (155)

• “So I propose to you, as you grow in Christ, that you form the vital habit of making the book of Psalms your lifelong companion. Befriend the Psalms deeply. Never go too long without making them your own prayers. They give voice, sacred voice, to every circumstance, every emotion, every distress we walk through in this fallen wilderness of a world.” (155)

IX. Supernaturalized 

• "The natural inertia of all our Christian ministry and living is to proceed out of our own resources, asking God to add his blessing to our efforts. It's how we all tend to operate without even realizing it, even as born again believers. But it is backward." (159)

• "The Father ordains salvation, the Son accomplishes salvation, and the Spirit applies salvation. In other words, there is no Christian life without the Spirit. The Christian life is purely theoretical if there is no operation of the Spirit. Everything that we experience of God is the working of the Spirit. That is true at conversion, as the Spirit opens our eyes to our sin and Christ's saving offer. And it is true of our growth." (160)

• "The Holy Spirit is how God gets inside you. If you are a Christian, you are now permanently indwelt by the Spirit, and if you are permanently ind welt by the Spirit, then you have been supernaturalized." (160)

• "...the Spirit is the continuation, so to speak, of Jesus himself. Jesus spoke of his departure being necessary so that the Spirit could come John 16:7; cf. 14:12-17). In the Spirit, we have something more wonderful than those who spoke and ate with Jesus himself. And this Spirit's arrival marks the dawning new creation." (163)

• "To grow as a disciple of Christ is not adding Christ to your life but collapsing into Christ as your life. He's not a new top priority, competing with the other claims of reputation, finances, and sexual gratification. He is asking you to embrace the freefall of total abandon to his purpose in your life." (166)

• "In brief: the Spirit effectually causes us to behold Christ in such a way that transforms us." (169)

• "Be so radically Spirit-led that you are therefore radically Christ-centered.

  Christ and Spirit, the incarnate Son and the indwelling Spirit--this is your double gift." (169)

Conclusion: What now?

• "The final conclusion, the deepest secret, to growing in Christ is this: look to him. Set your gaze upon him. Abide in him, hour by hour. Draw strength from his love. He is a person, not a concept. Become personally acquainted with him, ever more deeply as the years roll by." (171)

• "I do not have nine things to say. I have one thing to say. Look to Christ. You will grow in Christ as you direct your gaze to Christ. If you take your eyes off of Jesus Christ and direct your gaze to your own growth, you will prevent the very growth you desire." (171)

• "I have asked the question: what must happen in the individual human heart, most fundamentally, most deeply, for a man or woman to get traction and grow? And the message of this book is that the way we grow is receiving the heartful love of Jesus. The gospel of grace not only gets us in but moves us along." (173)

• "Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief? Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams. Feel his all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in his almighty arms." (174)

Notable Content

• Seven facets of Christ (23-34)

  1. Ruling

  2. Saving

  3. Befriending

  4. Persevering

  5. Interceding

  6. Returning

  7. Tenderness

• Four different ways Christians understand growth: (53)

1. God then me

2. God not me

3. God plus me

4. God in me

• Nine common but wrong ways to read the Bible: (150)

1. The warm-fuzzies approach - reading the Bible for a glowing, subjective experience of God, ignited by the words of the text, whether we understand what they actually mean or not. Result: frothy reading.

2. The grumpy approach - reading the Bible out of nothing but a vague sense that we're supposed to, to get God off our backs for the day. Result: resentful reading.

3. The gold-mine approach- reading the Bible as a vast, cavernous, dark mine, in which one occasionally stumbles upon a nugget of inspiration. Result: confused reading.

4. The hero approach -reading the Bible as a moral hall of fame that gives us one example after another of heroic spiritual giants to emulate. Result: despairing reading.

5. The rules approach -reading the Bible on the lookout for commands to obey to subtly reinforce a sense of personal superiority.Result: Pharisaical reading.

6. The Indiana Jones approach -reading the Bible as an ancient document about events in the Middle East a few thousand years ago that are irrelevant to my life today. Result: bored reading.

7. The magic-eight-ball approach_-reading the Bible as a road map to tell me where to work, whom to marry, and what car to buy. Result: anxious reading.

8. The Aesop's Fables approach- reading the Bible as a loose collection of nice stories strung together independently, each with a nice moral at end. Result: disconnected reading.

9. The doctrine approach reading the Bible as a theological repository to plunder for ammunition for our next theology debate at Starbucks. Result: cold reading.

• What did the Old Testament anticipate taking place at the end of the world? (161)

1. The ruinous fall into sin at Eden wrought by Adam would be undone

2. God would make a new creation.

3. Sin and evil would be judged.

4. God would triumph once and for all over his enemies.

5. God's people would be vindicated.

6. The nations of the world would flock to Jerusalem

7. Messiah would come.

8. The latter-day kingdom would be launched.

9. The dead would be raised.

Notes on *Gentle and Lowly*

Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers, Dane Ortlund (Crossway, 2020)

Main Idea/Takeaway

The heart of Jesus, according to his own testimony, is gentle and lowly to all who cry to him for help, which cannot be over-celebrated or too exaggerated.

• “Gentle and lowly" This, according to his own testimony, is Christ's very heart. This is who he is. Tender. Open. Welcoming. Accommodating. Understanding. Willing. If we are asked to say only one thing about who Jesus is, we would be honoring Jesus's own teaching if our answer is, gentle and lowly." (21)

• “This is the one whose deepest heart is, more than anything else, gentle and lowly.” (24)

Interaction

• "Miracles are the only truly natural thing in a world fallen to unnatural, demonized." (31)

• "Jesus has felt the full force of our temptation because he endured it unto purity whereas we give in. Jesus endured temptation all the way to purity, thus enduring temptation longer, more fully." (48)

• "This truth changes everything in our experience of pain." (50)

• "I see the grammatical similarity, but what is the implication? Co-suffer/restrained passion?" (52)

• "Our places of most severe brokenness are the places where Jesus is most strongly drawn." (83)

• "'Most humble' In what moment was he most humble? The cross. Humility is not a virtue for tranquility, but for chaos." (97)

• "We must understand anger as a form of love- a defense of our loves against threats." (109)

• "God with us became God in us." (124)

• "His anger requires provocation." (148)

• "What are the implications here for how to treat fellow Christians who differ on convictions? We may disagree with them, but they are so loved by God. Tread carefully with God's beloved." (173)

• "Best page in the book!" (179)

• "Oh to see the brethren this way!" (187)

• "Good Friday meditation" (200)

• "Crucial qualification" (204)

• "All good things do not come to an end, because the best of things will last forever and only get better throughout eternity." (213)

• "On applying to life." (215)

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. His Very Heart

II. His Heart in Action

III. The Happiness of Christ

IV. Able to Sympathize

V. He Can Deal Gently

VI. I Will Never Cast Out

VII. What Our Sins Evoke

VIII. To the Uttermost

IX. An Advocate

X. The Beauty of the Heart of Christ

XI. The Emotional Life of Christ

XII. A Tender Friend

XIII. Why the Spirit?

XIV. Father of Mercies

XV. His "Natural" Work and His "Strange" Work

XVI. The Lord, the Lord

XVII. His Ways Are Not Our Ways

XVIII. Yearning Bowels

XIX. Rich in Mercy

XX. Our Law-ish Hearts, His Lavish Heart

XXI. He Loved Us Then; He'll Love Us Now

XXII. To the End

XXIII. Buried in His Heart Forevermore

Epilogue

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction

• “This is a book about the heart of Christ. Who is he? Who is he really? What is most natural to him? What ignites within him most immediately as he moves toward sinners and sufferers? What flows out most freely, most instinctively? Who is he?” (13)

• “We are not focusing centrally on what Christ has done. We are considering who he is. The two matters are bound up together and indeed interdependent. But they are distinct. The gospel offers us not only legal exoneration--in-violably precious truth! -it also sweeps us into Christ's very heart.” (15)

I. His Very Heart

• “One thing to get straight right from the start is that when the Bible speaks of the heart, whether Old Testament or New, it is not speaking of our emotional life only but of the central animating center of all we do.” (18)

• “The point in saying that Jesus is lowly is that he is accessible. For all his resplendent glory and dazzling holiness, his supreme uniqueness and otherness, no one in human history has ever been more approachable than Jesus Christ. No prerequisites. No hoops to jump through.” (20)

• “You don't need to unburden or collect yourself and then come to Jesus. Your very burden is what qualifies you to come. No payment is required; he says, "I will give you rest." His rest is gift, not transaction.” (21)

• “This is not who he is to everyone, indiscriminately. This is who he is for those who come to him, who take his yoke upon them, who cry to him for help.” (21)

II. His Heart in Action

• “But the dominant note left ringing in our ears after reading the Gospels, the most vivid and arresting element of the portrait, is the way the Holy Son of God moves toward, touches, heals, embraces, and forgives those who least deserve it yet truly desire it.” (27)

• “The Jesus given to us in the Gospels is not simply one who loves, but one who is love; merciful affections stream from his innermost heart as rays from the sun.” (27)

• “This is deeper than saying Jesus is loving or merciful or gracious. The cumulative testimony of the four Gospels is that when Jesus Christ sees the fallenness of the world all about him, his deepest impulse, his most natural instinct, is to move toward that sin and suffering, not away from it.” (30)

• "When Jesus, the Clean One, touched an unclean sinner, Christ did not become unclean. The sinner became clean." (31)

• "We are so used to a fallen world that sickness, disease, pain, and death seem natural. In fact, they are the interruption." (31)

• "The New Testament teaches that we are united to Christ, a union so intimate that whatever our own body parts do, Christ's body can be said to do (1 Cor. 6:15-1). Jesus Christ is closer to you today than he was to the sinners and sufferers he spoke with and touched in his earthly ministry." (33)

III. The Happiness of Christ

• “He drew near to us in the incarnation so that his joy and ours could rise and fall together-his in giving mercy, ours in receiving it.” (37)

• “We tend to think that when we approach Jesus for help in our need and mercy amid our sins, we somehow detract from him, lessen him, impoverish him. Goodwin argues otherwise. Jesus surprises us in "exercising acts of grace, and from his continual doing good unto and for his members ... from his filling them with all mercy, grace, comfort, and felicity, himself becoming yet more full, by filling them."4 As truly God, Christ cannot become any more full; he shares in his Father's immortal, eternal, unchangeable fullness. Yet as truly man, Christ's heart is not drained by our coming to him; his heart is filled up all the more by our coming to him.” (38)

• “When we today partake of that atoning work, coming to Christ for forgiveness, communing with him despite our sinfulness, we are laying hold of Christ's own deepest longing and joy.” (40)

IV. Able to Sympathize

• “The reason that Jesus is in such close solidarity with us is that the difficult path we are on is not unique to us.” (47)

• “That enticing * temptation, that sore trial, that bewildering perplexity- he has been there. Indeed, his utter purity suggests that he has felt these pains more acutely than we sinners ever could.” (48)

• “One is that Jesus's sinlessness means that he knows temptation better than we ourselves do. C. S. Lewis made this point by speaking of a man walking against the wind. Once the wind of temptation gets strong enough, the man lies down, giving in-and thus not knowing what it would have been like ten minutes later. Jesus never lay down; he endured all our temptations and testings without ever giving in. He therefore knows the strength of temptation better than any of us. Only he truly knows the cost." (49)

• “He himself is not trapped in the hole of sin with us; he alone can pull us out. His sinlessness is our salvation.” (49)

• “Not only can he alone pull us out of the hole of sin; he alone desires to climb in and bear our burdens. Jesus is able to sympathize.” (49)

• “If you are in Christ, you have a Friend who, in your sorrow, will never lob down a pep talk from heaven. He cannot bear to hold himself at a distance. Nothing can hold him back. His heart is too bound up with yours.” (50)

V. He Can Deal Gently

• “What elicits tenderness from Jesus is not the severity of the sin but whether the sinner comes to him. Whatever our offense, he deals gently with us. If we never come to him, we will experience a judgment so fierce it will be like a double-edged sword coming out of his mouth at us (Rev. 1:16; 2:12; 19:15, 21). If we do come to him, as fierce as his lion-like judgment would have been against us, so deep will be his lamb-like tenderness for us (cf. Rev. 5:5-6; Isa. 40:10-11). We will be enveloped in one or the other. To no one will Jesus be neutral.” (54)

• “This very care, this gentle dealing with all kinds of sinners, is what is most natural to him. Owen goes on to say that Christ "does not, in his dealings with us, more properly or more fully set out any property of his nature than he does his compassion, long-suffering, and forbearance."4 In other words, when Jesus "deals gently" with us, he is doing what is most fitting and natural to him.” (56)

• “Our sinfulness runs so deep that a tepid measure of gentleness from Jesus would not be enough; but as deep our sinfulness runs, ever deeper runs his gentleness.” (56)

• “Contrary to what we expect to be the case, therefore, the deeper into weakness and suffering and testing we go, the deeper Christ's solidarity with us. As we go down into pain and anguish, we are descending ever deeper into Christ's very heart, not away from it.” (57)

VI. I Will Never Cast Out

• “So with Christ. We cling to him, to be sure. But our grip is that of a two-year-old amid the stormy waves of life. His sure grasp never falters. Psalm 63:8 expresses the double-sided truth: "My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” (65)

• “We have come, more deeply, to the doctrine of the perseverance of the heart of Christ. Yes, professing Christians can fall away, proving that they were never truly in Christ. Yes, once a sinner is united to Christ, there is nothing that can dis-unite them. But within the skeletal structure of these doctrines, what is the beating heart of God, made tangible in Christ? What is most deeply instinctive to him as our sins and sufferings pile up? What keeps him from growing cold? The answer is, his heart.” (66)

VII. What Our Sins Evoke

• “But the grace of God comes to us no more and no less than Jesus Christ comes to us. In the biblical gospel we are not given a thing; we are given a person.” (69)

• “If you are part of Christ's own body, your sins evoke his deepest heart, his compassion and pity. He "takes part with you"-that is, he's on your side. He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin. He hates sin. But he loves you. We understand this, says Goodwin, when we consider the hatred a father has against a terrible disease afflicting his child--the father hates the disease while loving the child. Indeed, at some level the presence of the disease draws out his heart to his child all the more.” (71)

• “God is not a platonic ideal, immovably austere, beyond the reach of meaningful human engagement. God is free of all fallen emotion, but not all emotion (or feeling) whatsoever--where do our own emotions come from, we who are made in his image?” (74)

• “The Bible says that when God looks at his people's sinfulness, his transcendent holiness-

  -his God-ness, his very divinity, that about God which makes him not us--is what makes him unable to come down on his people in wrath.” (74)

• “The sins of those who belong to God open the floodgates of his heart of compassion for us. The dam breaks. It is not our loveliness that wins his love. It is our unloveliness.” (75)

VIII. To the Uttermost

• “It is the most counterintuitive aspect of Christianity, that we are declared right with God not once we begin to get our act together but once we collapse into honest acknowledgment that we never will.” (78)

• “And the present manifestation of his heart for his people is his constant interceding on their behalf.” (79)

• “What then does it mean for Christ to intercede? Who are the parties involved? God the Father, on the one hand, and we believers, on the other. But why would Jesus need to intercede for us? After all, haven't we been completely justified already? What is there for Christ to plead on our behalf? Hasn't he already done all that is needed to fully acquit us? In other words, does the doctrine of Christ's heavenly intercession mean that something was left incomplete in his atoning work on the cross? If we speak of the finished work of Christ on the cross, does the doctrine of intercession suggest that the cross was actually left unfinished? The answer is that intercession applies what the atonement accomplished. Christ's present heavenly intercession on our behalf is a reflection of the fullness and victory and completeness of his earthly work, not a reflection of anything lacking in his earthly work. The atonement accomplished our salvation; intercession is the moment-by-moment application of that atoning work.” (79)

• “Intercession is the constant hitting "refresh" of our justification in the court of heaven.” (80)

• “The Son's intercession does not reflect the coolness of the Father but the sheer warmth of the Son.” (80)

• “But the Father's own deepest delight is to say yes to the Son's pleading on our behalf.” (80)

• “To the uttermost" in Hebrews 7:25 means: God's forgiving, redeeming, restoring touch reaches down into the darkest crevices of our souls, those places where we are most ashamed, most defeated. More than this: those crevices of sin are themselves the places where Christ loves us the most. His heart willingly goes there. His heart is most strongly drawn there.” (83)

• “This is the explicit acknowledgment that we Christians are ongoing sinners. Christ continues to intercede on our behalf in heaven because we continue to fail here on earth. He does not forgive us through his work on the cross and then hope we make it the rest of the way.” (84)

IX. An Advocate

• “To come to the Father without an advocate is hopeless. To be allied with an advocate, one who came and sought me out rather than waiting for me to come to him, one who is righteous in all the ways I am not--this is calm and confidence before the Father.” (89)

• “Your salvation is not merely a matter of a saving formula, but of a saving person. When you sin, his strength of resolve rises all the higher. When his brothers and sisters fail and stumble, he advocates on their behalf because it is who he is. He cannot bear to leave us alone to fend for ourselves.” (91)

X. The Beauty of the Heart of Christ

• "Everything that is lovely in God is in Christ, and everything that 15 or can be lovely in any man is in him: for he is man as well as God, and he is the holiest, meekest, most humble, and every way the most excellent man that ever was." (97)

• “In our churches today we often refer to the glory of God and the glory of Christ. But what is it about God's glory that draws us in and causes us to conquer our sins and makes us radiant people? Is it the sheer size of God, a consideration of the immensity of the universe and thus of the Creator, a sense of God's transcendent greatness, that pulls us toward him? No, Edwards would say; it is the loveliness of his heart. It is, he says, a "sight of the divine beauty of Christ, that bows the wills, and draws the hearts of men. A sight of the greatness of God in his attributes, may overwhelm men.” (97)

• “Seeing only his greatness, "the enmity and opposition of the heart, may remain in its full strength, and the will remain inflexible; whereas, one glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God, and supreme amiableness of Jesus Christ, shining into the heart, overcomes and abolishes this opposition, and inclines the soul to Christ, as it were, by an omnipotent power." (98)

• “In other words, when we come to Christ, we are startled by the beauty of his welcoming heart. The surprise is itself what draws us in.” (98)

• "There is no love so great and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ." How might we, in our own way and time, do the same?” (100)

• “But at the center, our job is to show our kids that even our best love is a shadow of a greater love. To put a sharper edge on it: to make the tender heart of Christ irresistible and unforgettable. Our goal is that our kids would leave the house at eighteen and be unable to live the rest of their lives believing that their sins and sufferings repel Christ." (100)

• “But there's something he has shown me that runs even deeper than truth about God, and that is the heart of God, proven in Christ, the friend of sinners. Dad made that heart beautiful to me He didn't crowbar me into that; he drew me in.” (101)

XI. The Emotional Life of Christ

• “The Son of God clothed himself with humanity and will never unclothe him-self. He became a man and always will be. This is the significance of the doctrine of Christ's ascension: he went into heaven with the very body, reflecting his full humanity, that was raised out of the tomb.” (103)

• “One implication of this truth of Christ's permanent humanity is that when we see the feeling and passions and affections of the incarnate Christ toward sinners and sufferers as given to us in the four Gospels, we are seeing who Jesus is for us today.” (104)

• “Our emotions are diseased by the fall, of course, just as every part of fallen humanity is affected by the fall. But emotions are not themselves a result of the fall. Jesus experienced the full range of emotions that we do (Heb. 2:17; 4:15).” (104)

• “Yes, Jesus pronounced searing denunciations on those who cause children to sin, saying it would be a better fate if they were drowned (Matt. 18:6), not because he gleefully enjoys torturing the wicked but most deeply because he loves little children. It is his heart of love, not a gleeful exacting of justice, that rises up from his soul to elicit such a fearsome pronouncement of woe.” (109)

• “What we are saying is that, yes, Christ got angry and still gets angry, for he is the perfect human, who loves too much to remain indifferent. And this righteous anger reflects his heart, his tender compassion. But because his deepest heart is tender compassion, he is the quickest to get angry and feels anger most furiously- and all without a hint of sin tainting that anger.” (110)

• “While Christ is a lion to the impenitent, he is a lamb to the penitent--the reduced, the open, the hungry, the desiring, the confessing, the self-effacing. He hates with righteous hatred all that plagues you.” (111)

• “As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion for you. The indignation he felt when he came upon mistreatment of others in the Gospels is the same indignation he feels now in heaven upon mistreatments of you.” (112)

XII. A Tender Friend

• “The very two groups of people whom Jesus is accused of befriending in Matthew 11 are those who can't stay away from him in Luke 15. They are at ease around him. They sense something different about him.” (114)

• “In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence.” (115)

• “To be sure, Christ is indeed our ruler, our authority, the one to whom all allegiance and obedience are reverently due. Sibbes reminds us of that explicitly as he reflects on the friendship of Christ ("As he is our friend, so he is our king."). But equally, and perhaps less obvious or intuitive to us, the condescension of God in the person of his Son means that he approaches us on our own terms and befriends us for both his and our mutual delight.” (119)

XIII. Why the Spirit?

• “The Spirit takes what we read in the Bible and believe on paper about Jesus's heart and moves it from theory to reality, from doctrine to experience.” (122)

• “What is the advantage of the Spirit coming? The natural reading is that he will rectify something that is wrong. And what is wrong? "Sorrow has filled your heart" John 16:6). Apparently the coming of the Spirit will do the opposite: fill their hearts with joy. The Spirit replaces sorrow with joy.” (123)

• “The Spirit is the continuation of the heart of Christ for his people after the departure of Jesus to heaven.” (123)

• “All that we see and hear of the gracious heart of Jesus in his earthly life will, during his ascended state, enter into the consciousness of his people as experiential reality.” (125)

XIV. Father of Mercies

• “The key is to understand that at the level of legal acquittal, the Father's wrath had to be assuaged in order for sinners to be brought back into his favor, but at the level of his own internal desire and affection, he was as eager as the Son for this atonement to take place. Objectively, the Father was the one needing to be placated; subjectively, his heart was one with the Son. We err when we draw conclusions about who he is subjectively based on what needed to happen objectively.” (128)

• “What should come into our mind when we think about God The triune God is three in one, a fountain of endless mercies extending to, meeting, and over-flowingly providing for us in all our many needs and failures and wanderings. This is who he is, Father no less than Son, Son no less than Father.” (132)

• “He is the tangible epitomization of God. Jesus Christ is the visible manifestation of the invisible God (2 Cor. 4:4, 6).” (133)

• “When we see the heart of Christ, then, throughout the four Gospels, we are seeing the very compassion and tenderness of who God himself most deeply is.” (133)

XV. His "Natural" Work and His "Strange" Work

• “Jesus provides new sharpness to who God is, but not fundamentally new content.” (135)

• “But when he comes to show mercy, to manifest that it is his nature and disposition, it is said that he does it with his whole heart. There is nothing at all in him that is against it. The act itself pleases him for itself. There is no reluctance in him.” (139)

• “Theologians speak of God's simplicity, by which we mean that God is not the sum total of a number of attributes, like pieces of a pie making a whole pie; rather, God is every attribute perfectly. God does not have parts. He is just. He is wrathful. He is good. And so on, each in endless perfection.” (140)

• “God is unswervingly just. But what is his disposition? What is he on the edge of his seat eager to do? Ir you catch me off guard, what will leap out of me before I have time to regain composure will likely be grouchiness. If you catch God off guard, what leaps out most freely is blessing. The impulse to do good. The desire to swallow us up in joy." (140)

• “For God to be merciful is for God to be God. Left to our own natural intuitions about God, we will conclude that mercy is his strange work and judgment his natural work. Rewiring our vision of God as we study the Scripture, we see, helped by the great teachers of the past, that judgment is his strange work and mercy his natural work.” (144)

XVI. The Lord, the Lord

• “When we speak of God's glory, we are speaking of who God is, what he is like, his distinctive resplendence, what makes God God. And when God himself sets the terms on what his glory is, he surprises us into wonder.” (147)

• “The bent of God's heart is mercy. His glory is his goodness. His glory is his lowliness. "Great is the glory of the LoRD. For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly" (Ps. 138:5-6).” (147)

• “But not once are we told that God is "provoked to love" or "provoked to mercy." His anger requires provocation; his mercy is pent up, ready to gush forth.” (148)

• "Keeping steadfast love for thousands." This could equally be translated "keeping steadfast love to a thousand generations," as is explicitly stated in Deuteronomy 7:9: "Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations." This does not mean that his goodness shuts off with generation number 1,001. It is God's own way of saying. There is no termination date on my commitment to you. You can't get rid of my grace to you. You can't outrun my mercy. You can't evade my goodness. My heart is set on you.” (149)

XVII. His Ways Are Not Our Ways

• “So God tells us in plain terms how tiny our natural views of his heart are. His thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. And not because we're just a few degrees off. No, "as high as the heavens are above the earth"-a Hebrew way of expressing spatial infinitude-_-"so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (v. 9). In verse 8 God says his ways and ours are different; in verse 9 he gets more specific and says his thoughts are higher. It's as if God is saying in verse 8 that he and we think very differently, whereas in verse 9 he is saying precisely how, namely, his "thoughts" (the Hebrew word doesn't merely mean 'passing mental reflection" but "plans," " devices," "intentions," "purposes") are higher, grander, enveloped in a compassion for which we fallen sinners have no natural category.” (158)

• “There is indeed a great distance between God and us; we think small thoughts of God's heart, but he knows his heart is inviolably, expansively, invincibly set on us.”(159)

• “He intends to restore you into the radiant resplendence for which you were created. And that is dependent not on you keeping yourself clean but on you taking your mess to him. He doesn't limit himself to working with the unspoiled parts of us that remain after a lifetime of sinning. His power runs so deep that he is able to redeem the very worst parts of our past into the most radiant parts of our future. But we need to take those dark miseries to him.” (161)

XVIII. Yearning Bowels

• “Whom do you perceive him to be, in your sin and your suffer-ing? Who do you think God is-_-not just on paper but in the kind of person you believe is hearing you when you pray? How does he feel about you? His saving of us is not cool and calculating. It is a matter of yearning not yearning for the Facebook you, the you that you project to everyone around you. Not the you that you wish you were. Yearning for the real you. The you underneath everything you present to others.” (166)

• “Out of his heart flows mercy; out of ours, reluctance to receive it.” (166)

• “If the intensity of love maps onto the intensity of misery in the one beloved, and if our greatest misery is our sinfulness, then God's most intense love flows down to us in our sinfulness. Yes, God has hatred, Goodwin says--toward sin. And the combination of love for us plus hatred for sin equals the most omnipotent certainty possible that he will see us through to final liberation from sin and unfiltered basking in his own joyous heart for us one day.” (168)

XIX. Rich in Mercy

• “It means the Christian life is a lifelong shedding of tepid thoughts of the goodness of God. In his justice, God is exacting; in his mercy, God is overflowing.” (172)

• “But if he is essentially merciful, then for him to pour out mercy is for him to act in accord with who he is. It is simply for him to be God. When God shows mercy, he is acting in a way that is true to himself.” (173)

• “Perhaps you carry a pain that will never heal till you are dead. If my life is any evidence of the mercy of God in Christ, you might think, I'm not impressed. To you I say, the evidence of Christ's mercy toward you is not your life. The evidence of his mercy toward you is his--mistreated, misunderstood, betrayed, abandoned. Eternally. In your place. If God sent his own Son to walk through the valley of condemnation, rejection, and hell, you can trust him as you walk through your own valleys on your way to heaven.” (179)

• “To you I say, do you know what Jesus does with those who squander his mercy? He pours out more mercy. God is rich in mercy. That's the whole point.” (179)

• “That God is rich in mercy means that your regions of deepest shame and regret are not hotels through which divine mercy passes but homes in which divine mercy abides. It means the things about you that make you cringe most, make him hug hardest.” (179)

XX. Our Lawish Hearts, His Lavish Heart

• “There are two ways to live the Christian life. You can live it either for the heart of Christ or from the heart of Christ. You can live for the smile of God or from it.” (181)

• “A healthy Christian life is built on both the objective and the subjective sides of the gospel--the justification that flows from the work of Christ, and the love that flows from the heart of Christ.” (183)

• “As the gospel sinks in more deeply over time, and we wade ever deeper into the heart of Christ, one of the first outer shells of our old life that the gospel pierces is the doing of works unto approval.” (185)

• “There is an entire psychological substructure that, due to the fall, is a near-constant manufacturing of relational leveraging, fear-stuffing, nervousness, score-keeping, neurotic controlling, anxiety-festering silliness that is not something we say or even think so much as something we exhale.” (185)

• “The felt love of Christ really is what brings rest, wholeness, flourishing, shalom-that existential calm that for brief, gospel-sane moments settles over you and lets you step in out of the storm of of-works-ness.” (186)

• “And the Christian life is simply the process of bringing my sense of self, my Identity with a capital "I," the ego, my swirling internal world of fretful panicky-ness arising out of that gospel deficit, into alignment with the more fundamental truth. The gospel is the invitation to let the heart of Christ calm us into joy, for we've already been discovered, included, brought in. We can bring our up-and-down moral performance into subjection to the settled fixedness of what Jesus feels about us.” (187)

• “In the gospel, we are free to receive the comforts that are due us. Don't turn them off. Open the vent of your heart to the love of Christ, who loved you and gave himself for you.” (188)

XXI. He Loved Us Then; He'll Love Us Now

• “Perhaps, as believers today, we know God loves us. We really believe that. But if we were to more closely examine how we actually relate to the Father moment by moment-_-which reveals our actual theology, whatever we say we believe on paper--many of us tend to believe it is a love infected with disappointment.” (189)

• “God didn't meet us halfway. He refused to hold back, cautious, assessing our worth. That is not his heart. He and his Son took the initiative. On terms of grace and grace alone. In defiance of what we deserved. When we, despite our smiles and civility, were running from God as fast as we could, building our own kingdoms and loving our own glory, lapping up the fraudulent pleasures of the world, repulsed by the beauty of God and shutting up our ears at his calls to come home--it was then, in the hollowed-out horror of that revolting existence, that the prince of heaven bade his adoring angels farewell. It was then that he put himself into the murderous hands of these very rebels in a divine strategy planned from eternity past to rinse muddy sinners clean and hug them into his own heart despite their squirmy attempt to get free and scrub themselves clean on their own.” (191)

• “In Christ's death, God is confronting our dark thoughts of him and our chronic insistence that divine love must have an endpoint, a limit, a point at which it finally runs dry/Christ died to confound our intuitive assumptions that divine love has an expiration date. He died to prove that God's love is, as Jonathan Edwards put it, "an ocean without shores or bottom. God's love is as boundless as God himself. This is why the apostle Paul speaks of divine love as a reality that stretches to an immeasurable "breadth and length and height and depth" (Eph. 3:18)-the only thing in the universe as immeasurable as that is God himself. God's love is as expansive as God himself.” (192)

• “What's the ultimate point Paul is driving at in Romans 5:6-11? Not God's past work, mainly. Paul's deepest burden is our present security, given that past work.” (193)

• “Conversion isn't a fresh start. Conversion, authentic regeneration, is the invincibilizing of our future.” (193)

• “We will be less sinful in the next life than we are now, but we will not be any more secure in the next life than we are now.” (195)

XXII. To the End

• “This is not who Christ is indiscriminately. The text says it is "his own" whom he loves to the end.” (203)

• “To those who are not his own, Jesus is a fearful judge, one whose wrath cannot be assuaged or dampened; the Bible teaches that Jesus will one day be "revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus" (2 Thess. 1:7-8)." (204)

• "That passage goes on to say those who do not belong to Christ "will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction" (1:9). But for his own, Jesus himself endured that punishment. He set his heart on his own. They are his. "There is not the meanest, the weakest, the poorest believer on the earth," wrote Owen, "but Christ prizes him more than all the world." (204)

XXIII. Buried in His Heart Forevermore

• “When we live to glorify God, we step into the only truly humanizing way of living.”(205)

• “The creation of the world, and the ruinous fall into sin that called for a re-creative work, un-dammed the heart of Chris, And Christs heart food is how God's glory surges forth further and brighter than it ever could otherwise.” (207)

• “The creation of the world was to give vent to the gracious heart of Christ. And the joy of heaven is that we will enjoy that unfettered and undiluted heart forevermore.” (208)

• “The point of unending eternal life in the new heavens and the new earth is that God "might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” (209)

• “The very point of heaven and eternity is to enjoy his "grace in kindness." (209)

• “That thing we've done that sent our life into meltdown-that is where God in Christ becomes more real than ever in this life and more wonderful to us in the next. (And those of us who have been pretty squeaky clean will get there one day and realize more than ever how deeply sin and self-righteousness and pride and all kinds of willful subconscious rebellions were way down deep inside us, and how all that sends God's grace in kindness soaring, and we too will stand, astonished, at how great his heart is for us.” (210)

• “He sends his grace to us, personally, individually, eternally. Indeed, he sends himself--there's no such "thing" as grace (remembering that such a view is Roman Catholic teaching). He sends not grace in the abstract but Christ himself. That's why Paul immediately adds "in Christ Jesus." (211)

• “If are in Christ, you have been eternally invincibilized.” (211)

• “For those in Christ, for whom Ephesians 2:7 is the eternal vista just around the next bend in the road, this life is the worst it will ever get.” (212)

Epilogue

• "The Christian life boils down to two steps: (216)

  1. Go to Jesus.

  2. See #1."

• “Whatever is crumbling all around you in your life, wherever you feel stuck, this remains, un-deflectable: his heart for you, the real you, is gentle and lowly. So go to him. That place in your life where you feel most defeated, he is there; he lives there, right there, and his heart for you, not on the other side of it but in that darkness, is gentle and lowly.” (216)

Notable Content

• “As we zero in on the affectionate heart of Christ, how do we ensure that we are growing in a healthy understanding of the whole counsel of God and a comprehensive and therefore proportionate vision of who Christ is?" (29)

  1. First, the wrath of Christ and the mercy of Christ are not at odds with one another, like a see-saw, one diminishing to the degree that the other is held up.Rather, the two rise and fall together.

  2. Second, in speaking specifically of the heart of Christ (and the heart of God in the Old Testament), we are not really on the wrath-mercy spectrum anyway. His heart is his heart.

  3. Third, we are simply seeking to follow the biblical witness in speaking of Christ's heart of affection toward sinners and sufferers.

     In other words, if there appears to be some sense of disproportion in the Bible's portrait of Christ, then let us be accordingly disproportionate. Better to be biblical than artificially "balanced."

  4. In short: it is impossible for the affectionate heart of Christ to be over-celebrated, made too much of, exaggerated.

Notes on *The Preacher’s Catechism*

The Preacher’s Catechism, Lewis Allen (Crossway, 2018)

Main Idea/Takeaway

• The single most important thing for preachers is to be overcome by the gospel they proclaim. 

• "Our first calling is not to preach him, but to love him and to walk with him." (13)

Table of Contents

1. Preaching, above All

2. Enjoying God

3. The One We Preach

4. By the Book

5. Preaching Christ

6. All Our Days

7. Confident of This

8. Called to Preach

9. For God, for People

10. Not a Square Inch

11. Sin

12. Weakness

13. Knowing Jesus

14. For His Name's Sake

15. Rewarded

16. This Solid Ground

17. Lavish Love

18. Holiness

19. Journey's End

20. The Grace of Law

21. Obedience

22. Love's Choice

23. Image Rights?

24. Our Honor or His?

25. Stop!

26. Respect

27. Servant-Hearted Servants

28. Faithful Attraction

29. Give

30. True to His Word

31. Resist

32. The Heart of the Law

33. Trusting Ministry

34. At the Cross

35. The Courage of Our Convictions

36. Ministering Sacraments

37. Take Them to the Water

38. To Supper

39. Seek First

40. Praying, for His Glory

41. Trust Issues

42. Confession Time

43. All for the King

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction

• "Skills have an essential place, but more essential to our calling are a heart and mind captivated by God and his gospel." (17)

• "A fruitful ministry comes from the heart of a contented preacher. It's not about getting your life circumstances right (be that church, salary, peer recognition, or work-life balance). Some of the most impacting ministries have been carried out through truly wretched situations, filled with years of stress and opposition. So many preachers have stood firm and persevered with fruit owing to their deep heart contentment in the God of the gospel. Christ must be a treasure of ever-deepening worth to us." (18)

• "A preacher whose pulpit freshness comes from a living relationship with Jesus is a great blessing to the church."(19)

• "The Devil love a discouraged preacher, and his infernal crosshairs are always trained on us." (20)

• "Those who keep going in their preaching ministry do so only as they learn to nurture their own souls. Even the strongest of us are fragile men. It's not enough to preach grace; we need it ourselves." (20)

Preaching, above All

• "Above everything else, those of us who are called to preach need to know that God is love (1 John 4:8)." (27)

• "God loves, and shows that love, because he is love. Love is of God's essence. And so the source of all reality is a God of ardent, consuming, and delighting love. This is who he is." (28)

• "Our infinite happiness, as saved sinners, consists in enjoying the Son of God. Delight in Jesus is distinctly godlike, and is God's redemption purpose for the world. The Father is redeeming sinners to be delighters in his Son." (29)

• "What is your heartbeat? Do you love to preach, or do you love the One you preach? Do you love to prep your sermons, enjoying the hard mental and spiritual work, or do you love the One you are discovering more about." (30)

• "We must teach others that God is love, and that life on earth is an invitation from heaven to know that love and to live in the light of it." (30)

• "You can only preach what you love. You can only truly love if you know and are daily fed by the love of God. God is always preaching himself, as the God of love. He has no greater message, no other gospel, and no greater purpose. Neither do we."(30)

Enjoying God

• “God loves a cheerful preacher. Our ever-blessed, ever-joyful God wants to be proclaimed by those who are brimful of the joy his grace in Christ brings. He calls us to delight in him and, out of that joy,

  to call others to the feast. Preacher and sermon must be filled with gospel joy.” (31)

• “Why single out joy when joy is so often crowded out by almost anything else? The reason is that joy, like nothing else, shows whether we really believe the gospel. Joy is gospel authenticity. Joy is not an emotional buzz, an escape from the difficulties we face. To know Jesus Christ means to taste, and to want to taste more, the delights of peace with God the Father, who cares for and smiles on us, the Son, who journeys with us, and the Spirit, who empowers us.” (32)

• “Life in Christ is not, above all, a set

  of commands to obey externally but the inward work of the Holy Spirit to remake our minds and hearts.” (32)

• “The Christian life begins with hearing the Word of God in the power of the Spirit and responding to Jesus Christ in repentance and faith. Christian maturity is an ongoing experience of the same:

  we see Christ in his Word, and we worship him, gladly giving our hearts to his lordship.” (33)

• “God designs that his church be served by Word-soaked, joy-seeking, and joy-sharing

  preachers of his delightful gospel.” (34)

The One We Preach

• “Preachers have a single calling, to express who and what God is. This is our mandate, to declare what God has revealed about himself.” (35) 

• “The preacher must teach people of God so that they can worship him with all their might. He must preach God so that they learn to adore the God who loves lost people because he chooses to, with no compulsion whatsoever, except the compulsion of the overflowing love of the Trinity.” (37)

By the Book

• “Why is the Bible such a thrilling and powerful book? Simply because it is all about Jesus Christ.” (40)

• “The Bible is Jesus's book, all that God has to show us about his Son, and all that we need to come to his Son and to be transformed by him. Make the Bible anything less than the discovery of Jesus, and no wonder we can so easily be dull preachers and disciples.“ (40)

1. Preaching Christ

• “Preaching, though, is ultimately divine activity. J. I. Packer says that it is "the event of God himself bringing to an audience a Bible-based, Christ-related, life-impacting message of instruction and direction through the words of a spokesperson.” (44)

• “The Emmaus road gives us a vital principle (Luke 24:25-27, 45): hearts that hear Christ in his Word and are opened to him are burning hearts.” (44)

All Our Days

• “Self-pity is as much out of place in Christian ministry as self-promotion is. Worship him because of who he is, the Lord of heaven and earth.” (49)

• “The life of a Christian, and of a Christian preacher, is a moment-by-moment giving of all his heart to God and God's grace, in the power of the Holy Spirit.” (50)

• “Get your heart pulled in its deepest impulses to God in Jesus Christ, and your preaching ministry, however difficult, will be a fitting expression of your life's worship.” (50)

Confident of This

• “The question we must face, and which our post-sermon activities betray, is this: can we find heart peace as we trust that God is at work? Whether we're jogging off our adrenaline or collapsed on the sofa, is there trust in our hearts? Do we really believe that

  our preaching will achieve God’s work?” (54)

Called to Preach

• “John Calvin identified the two aspects of a call of God to ministry: the individual's inner compulsion ("I have to do this") and the church's recognition of the man's necessary godliness and gifts in handling God's Word.” (56)

• “Only the servant-hearted are called to be servants of the Word.” (59)

For God, for People

• “You cannot honor God unless you are ministering the fullness of the gospel with gospel love for the good of the lost and the saved. Preaching to the glory of God is all about helping others to grasp and delight in the truth of the gospel. God's glory revealed in the cross of Christ and declared in preaching is the good of grace-hungry people. "The eternal salvation of the human soul, through the presentation of divine truth, is the end of preaching," William Shedd wrote. That is what God wants from you, and that is what your hearers need from you, regardless of whether they currently understand that or actually want it. Anything less is just bad preaching.” (62)

• “Preaching must always be an exercise in self-effacement, not self-promotion, or even self-fulfillment. Jesus says, "Feed my sheep,"not "Feed your ego." People must be led to Christ, and led on with Christ through preaching.”(62)

• “Our goal is to deepen the joy of our hearers in Jesus Christ.” (64)

• “Ministry is the battle against mistrust and misapplied confidence, in our own lives as well as in the lives of those we preach to.” (64)

• “God has invested his glory in his children seeing and delighting in the saving grace of his Son in his proclaimed Word.” (64)

Not a Square Inch

• “It's no good being convinced that the Lord wants you in the pulpit if you're not really sure about his involvement in the world beyond your allotted few square feet of activity each Sunday.” (65)

• “You are preaching into a universe ruled by King Jesus. This life-changing truth must be the solid ground for all your preaching. Believe it, and preach it.” (66)

• “Our calling is to speak gospel words in what often appears to be the chaos of our lives and the lives of our congregations. “Our God reigns" must never sound trite. It must always be heard for what it is, a uniquely hope-filled and peace-bringing claim.” (66)

• “Preachers are, by most measurements, believers with a good deal of faith. Because of that, it's

  all too easy to fail to appreciate the struggles many of our hearers have in believing. There again, time spent with fellow Christians who suffer, or time spent in our own trials, brings home the fact that faith is anything but natural or straightforward.” (67)

Sin

• The last Adam was a preacher as fearless as he was sinless. He always spoke God's Word in obedience to his Father and in the service of his listeners. His loyalty to God's Word took him to another tree, the cross, to die there as our Sin-Bearer (1 Per. 2:24).” (73)

Weakness

• “Perhaps we feel so low on Mondays precisely because we are low. Mondays have lessons of grace to teach us. We need the Monday gospel. Left to ourselves, we are all without hope.” (77)

Knowing Jesus

• “So if we want to find our strength again, we need to go back to Jesus, look to him, and live.” (80) 

• “With a daily walk with Jesus those fears don’t vanish, but they are brought under his control.” (82)

• “So, put Christ before you. Study him and speak to him. Give him your heart.” (82)

For His Name's Sake

• “Endure hardship" is the motto of apostolic ministry (see 2 Tim. 2:3; 4:5). Endure hardship. Not because it is good for you, like a diet or exercise, but because Jesus did, and our calling is to be transformed in the image of his holiness.” (84)

• “Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world.

  And self-sacrifice will lead us, his followers, not away from but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort.” (85)

Rewarded

• “The gospel makes no sense and has no power unless judgment is real and heaven’s reward is eternal.” (88)

• “The Lord of the harvest alone can give the increase; but he has given us the mandate of wielding prayer and the Word in order to see people brought to Christ and built up in him.”(90)

This Solid Ground

• "Because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption." We preachers can never get enough of this truth. It must master us, subduing our pride in success, and lifting and comforting us in disaster.” (92)

• “We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul." (94)

Lavish Love

• “Most of us who preach lurch between pride and despait, often in the same day. We puff ourselves up, delighted to be preachers. Says Spurgeon, «The pride of knowing replaces the humility of being known." And then, we fail in our task and are in the depths.

  The remedy is never that we should seek some stoic resignation in the highs and lows of ministry--never too up, never too down. The remedy is in the gospel, and especially in the gospel truth that in Christ we are adopted into God's family. The doctrine of adoption is vital for the preacher. We are not preachers first; we are not primarily servants, called to a round of preaching and teaching. Those things are secondary at best. Above everything else, we are sons, the adopted sons of God. We are children, with all of God's people. The Father has lavished his great

  love upon us to make us the children of God (1 John 3:1). The Son has given us the right to become those children John 1:12), and declares his delight in us as his brothers (Heb. 2:12-13).” (96)

• “Hard work for his sake is the privilege we get to do as

  an act of worship. It is the natural activity of children who know their Father's smile.” (97)

Holiness

• “In the light of God's Word we must identify

  our sins and repent of them; in their place we must think through new habits of godliness; we must pray specific prayers with discipline; we must put ourselves right into the fellowship of God's

  people, serving, sharing, and learning; we must learn to live out our baptism, take the Lord's Supper, and sit under good preaching.” (100) 

• ”Preaching is the commitment to showing our hearers from the Word that Jesus is powerfully real. Our growth in grace must not only back up our words; it must also display the real and powerful Jesus in our lives.” (100)

• “We must be holy. If we neglect this calling, we may well end up preaching ourselves, or getting in the way of our Master. If so, our unholiness will actually obscure the glory of Christ. If we are dull, if we are unmoved by the truths we handle in the pulpit, if

  an illustration we use is self-promoting or inappropriate for some other reason, if our words aren't conveying love and tenderness

  (the list could go on), then we are getting in the way of the beauty of Jesus.” (101)

• “The Lord might not give us crowds, but as M'Cheyne himself prayed, our longing should be to be as holy as a pardoned sinner can be. Only as we grow to be like Jesus are we effective in showing him to others in our lives and through our proclamation.” (101)

Journey's End

• “Even if we have sixty years of preaching behind us and have led thousands to a closer walk with Christ, it will be Christ alone who acquits us. We will never earn our salvation.” (105)

The Grace of Law

• “Preachers of Jesus must be like Jesus. No one will listen to a man to learn Christ if they cannot look at him and see Christ.” (109)

Obedience

• “Christ alone keeps the law for us in his obe-

  dience for our sakes, and he alone dies for us under the penal sentence of God for our lawbreaking. Slaves are redeemed and adopted into God's family, and a new nature is given to us.” (115)

Love's Choice

• “Will you really believe that your God can and will

meet all your needs, so that you will bring him all of the love and trust he is so very worthy of? He wants all of your heart, preacher, and unless he has that, he is satisfied by none of your ministry.” (122)

Image Rights?

• “The opposite of love is not hatred; it's indifference-

  "I don't care." But love does care. God will have us for himself. And that is the call, and the power,

  of the gospel?” (125)

Stop!

• “We are to enjoy our Sundays, not as anxious performers but as Christ-satisfied disciples.

  We give ourselves to God in worship and to our church families in fellowship. And we refuse to try to justify ourselves by our preaching. We yield to Jesus, surrender to his righteousness, and rest in his love.” (135)

Respect

• “Church members live in a secular environment of disrespect. Backbiting, disloyalty, and worse are the everyday hazards of their workplace. When they come to church, they must discover the freedom and peace of being in an utterly different culture. Respect

  and honor must be the tone of all relationships in the body of Christ. So it is with the preacher.” (139)

Faithful Attraction

• “Keep yourselves in the love of God" (Jude 1:21). If you are this loved through Christ, then explore it, stay in it, allow it to satisfy you. ‘Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. (Prov. 4:23).” (147)

Give

• “Giving suffcient time each week to preparing sermons is an act of will. It is a commitment to self-discipline, and when we decide to do it, it will put pressure on the rest of our schedules. It is,

  though, supremely an act of love.” (151)

True to His Word

• “Obedience to the commandment "Do not lie

  does not mean "tell the truth regardless of whom you crush under it," but it means "tell the truth in order to serve others in love.” (154)

• “The truth of God, the whole truth, with Jesus at the center, will become a chore, because it doesn't achieve your appointed goals. The Word preached faithfully deeply inconveniences you as well as your hearers with its demands. Your pride won't allow that

  for very many years. In time, you'll preach less of the Word and more of yourself.” (156)

• “If your ministry is a journey in self-love, then no one gets served, you least of all. If by grace you lay your heart and work before the King of kings, then your words will be filled with truth and love. Only then do preachers truly serve the King.” (156)

• “If your ministry is a journey in self-love, then no one gets served, you least of all. If by grace you lay your heart and work before the King of kings, then your words will be filled with truth and love. Only then do preachers truly serve the King.” (156)

Resist

• “One of the greatest psychological pressures for any preacher is being content with our current experience of God's grace and managing our longings for so much more blessing.” (157)

• “Coveting, at root, is a refusal to recognize God as God.” (158)

The Heart of the Law

• “Preachers are ambitious. At least, we should be. If we don't long that people will meet the risen Christ through our ministry, then what do we want to achieve through preaching?” (163) 

• “You and I must strive for excellence as we preach, without ever losing sight of the excellence the Lord calls for: ultimately, loving him and our neighbors is all that counts. That's our highest calling, in the pulpit and out of it.” (163)

Trusting Ministry

• “Salvation is of the Lord, and that includes the gift of faith in order to receive the saving work of Christ (Eph. 2:8; cf. 1:19). True saving faith is nothing less than the work of the Spirit of Christ in our hearts.” (169)

• “And the more you grow in the Spirit's power in response to the Word, the deeper your confidence in this Word will be, whether privately read or

  publicly preached.” (170)

• “Jesus offers himself through his Word in the gospel. Stand on the rock of this truth.” (170)

At the Cross

• “The gospel we preach must be the gospel we consciously rely on. And what we rely on, we love. Our greatest need, then, is a sight of our sins, and serious repentance at the cross for them. As we bring both our sin and our sorrow for it to the cross, we discover again the life Jesus died to bring us. There worship flows as we see our Savior in his life-bringing glory?” (172) 

• “Repentance isn't the soul wallowing in its muck (leave that to the pigs), it is the soul forsaking everything to find forgiveness and life in Jesus?” (174)

• “Commenting on Galatians 3:1, John Calvin said,

  ‘Let those who would discharge aright the ministry of the Gospel learn not merely to speak and declaim, but to penetrate into the consciences of men, to make them see Christ crucified, and feel the shedding

  of his blood.’ Preachers who know their own need of Jesus can do so, and will?” (174)

The Courage of Our Convictions

• “Would you lose your sorrows? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead's deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing

  which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of grief and sorrow; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead.” (178)

Ministering Sacraments

• “We must also recover our belief, then, that the pulpit needs to share its message with the baptistery and the Table, and that they must be given their rightful places in the drama of redeeming grace.” (181)

• “If your preaching is mediocre at times, or worse than that, don't indulge in despair: the Lord is

  near in his sacraments.” (181)

• “The sacraments are to show us the gospel and to strengthen our gospel faith, as we've seen. They teach us who belongs to Christ and who doesn't. And so, they call us to renewed trust in Christ and to enduring obedience to him, by his grace. We have

  been washed by Christ, and we are feeding on him. Could we need anything else? So finish your sermon on time, preacher. Don't weary your hearers. They've heard the gospel from you. And now, in water, bread, and wine, let them see it and celebrate it.” (182)

Seek First

• “If you wait until your day is less busy, your heart is less burdened, your moods make it feel exciting, or your sin takes wings and flies away, you will never pray.” (192)

• “The Westminster Shorter Catechism states that prayer is "an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies." (193)

• “Only a living, honest relationship with God nurtured and expressed in prayer, will keep us from hellish hypocrisy and fill us with the life of Christ.” (193)

• “Prayer is recapturing a Christ-centered worldview,

  in which we celebrate again his loving rule. Problems might not go away, but they regain their God-ordained perspective.“ (195)

Praying, for His Glory

• “Preaching easily falls into a default setting of "Yours be the glory, O Lord; and a little to me, too, please." We need to root out that spirit of pride, that clawing, grasping, insecure longing for the praise of men. We do so with prayer. Pray that the Father would set a delight in his glory in Christ deep in your affections

  so that the thought of even trying to snatch a hint of the glory due God alone would disgust you.” (199)

• “You are praying and working not to grow a big church but to serve a church so that people will increasingly yield their lives to Jesus Christ.” (200)  

Trust Issues

• “His presence can still racing thoughts, give hope

  for despairing preachers, and bring back restless, wandering desires to him. You believe that for your congregation, don't you? Believe it for yourself. And experience it as the gift of God to his praying children, including his preachers.” (203)

Confession Time

• “The preacher who repents will live and thrive. Try it. And the ministry that is bathed in repentance and enjoying renewing grace will be a truly gospel one, and will bear the hallmarks of authenticity.” (208) 

All for the King

• “When our hearts bow joyfully to the King, then, and only then, will our preaching have any integrity and impact.” (210)

• “Love only the work, and the work will crush us. Of course it will; the needs of a struggling church and a broken world are completely overwhelming. And while we effectively forget who God is in his gospel love, we will think that he achieves some satisfaction

  (some glory, even) in our being overworked and beaten down.”(210)

• “Preaching is the declaration of the God we know. Preaching is one broken sinner saying to others with exactly the same struggles, "This is the grace I'm discovering, which I long for you to know with me." (210)

• “You can see and you can hear when people are contented. The church can see and hear when those in the pulpit are delighting in Christ and satisfied

  in him. True contentment is as powerful as it is visible.” (211)

• “And so we dare to pursue contentment in God. We dare believe that there is such a place of settled joy and peace in Jesus. We really can make him our treasure when life and ministry are painful, as much as when they are exciting. We can, and we must. To him be the glory, forever.” (211)

Notable Content 

Six questions to help asses whether sin has crept into your preaching. (73)

1. What happens in my heart when people thank me for my preaching? Do I straight away silently thank God that they were blessed? Or do I thank myself for my skills as a preacher?

2. When I preach a terrible sermon, why does it devastate me? Is it because I don't think that Christ's sheep have been fed? Or is it because my ego hasn't been stroked?

3. Do I preach to serve my hearers or to scratch my own preaching itches? Do I choose passages for the pulpit because I know they will serve where my hearers are in need or because I prefer them and think I preach them well?

4. When someone says something critical that is true but painful about my preaching (to me or to someone else, and it has gotten back to me), is my first response angry self-pity, or do I give God thanks for this Spirit-given opportunity to grow in my preaching?

5. Should I adopt a different preaching tone and style or perhaps preach shorter sermons in order to reach my hearers more effectively? Or do pride and fear tie me to preaching as I always have?

6. Do I ever have the courage to ask those closest to me (my wife or the church's leaders) about my preaching? Am I prepared for honest and loving feedback, or do I wish to keep justifying my ministry exactly as it is?

Ten Commandments, re-written: (116)

1. Put nothing in the place of Jesus.

2. Make nothing which gets in the way of your love for Jesus.

3. Honor Jesus' Name in all you do.

4. Seek your soul's rest in Jesus.

5. Honor your parents, as a love-expression for Jesus.

6. Do not murder, as Jesus brings life, never death.

7. Keep sexually pure, because Jesus has won your body, as well as your heart.

8. Do not steal, because Jesus is enough.

9. Do not lie, because Jesus is the truth, and loves the truth.

10. Don't set your heart on anything, because Jesus really is enough.

    Four pointers to obey the commandment concerning contentment: (159)

    1. Believe that God is who he is.

    2. Identify your discontentment, and starve it.

    3. List your blessings, and celebrate them.

    4. Knowing Jesus is contentment. 

Notes on *The Care of Souls*

The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart, Harold Senkbeil (Lexham Press, 2019)

Main Idea/Takeaway

Our primary habitus as pastors is to know Jesus and give him to others through Word and sacrament.

• "The classical texts of pastoral care have always called the cure of souls a habitus, a pastoral temperament or character worked by the Holy Spirit through his means."

• "Genuine habitus: doing all you've been given to do in the full realization that you're only an instrument for the Lord to do his work through you."(22)

• "This, I'm convinced, is the sole power for consistent ministry as pastors. We love because we have first been loved- then we in turn love others as we ourselves have been loved. We are, in a very real sense, only channels or conduits for the love of Christ that enfolds us, impels us and compels us for faithful work in service of the Great Shepherd who has laid down his life for us all." (121)

• "Our job is not to usher in perfection, but to bring people to Jesus and him to them." (180)

• "Your job is merely to bring people to Jesus and Jesus to people." (194)

Interaction 

• We are commending the person, Jesus. (14)

• Give them Jesus. (17)

• Guilt is as objective, specific, internal response to sin committed. Shame is something you wear- its the identity you take on in the aftermath of sin that either you committed or was committed against you." (140)

• When it comes to sexual desire, our calling is chastity. There's no neutral ground. It's either virtue or vice. Either fidelity (if married) or abstinence (if single)- the calling to virtue. It is a positive call- "live this way!" Not merely negative against the sin/vice- "don't do that!" (177)

• The liturgy our local church on Sundays is meant to give shape to our whole Christian lives. (188)

Table of Contents

I. The Pastoral Craft: One Farm Boy's Story

II. What is a Pastor? The Classical Model

III. The Cure of Souls: Attentive Diagnosis

IV. The Cure of Souls: Intentional Treatment

V. Sheep-Dogging and Shepherding: The Noble Task

VI. Guilt and Shame

VII. Holiness and the Cure of Souls

VIII. Drawing Near to God: Proximity and Holiness

IX. Invisible PowersL Spiritual Warfare

X. Christ's "Other Sheep": Mission and the Care of Souls

XI. The Shepherding of Shepherds

XII. Always Be Steady: Equilibrium in Ministry

Conclusion: Joy in Office

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Preface

• "This is the secret for sustainable pastoral work: You need to realize that you've got nothing to give to others that you yourself did not receive. Jesus loves you first, then you love him back by loving his sheep and lambs in his name and stead." (xx)

I. The Pastoral Craft: One Farm Boy's Story

• "Pastors do not teach mere ideas or concepts; by their ministrations they bring Jesus himself into the hearts and lives of people ravaged with guilt, burdened with shame, and struggling under a boatload of pain in all its dimensions: physical, emotional, and spiritual."(14)

• "Wherever pastors bring the words and mysteries of Jesus, they bring Jesus himself, and he personally does the comforting." (14)

• "Whenever and wherever pastors do this work of Jesus, Jesus himself is present, even though he remains unseen." (15)

• "So then, effective and faithful pastoral ministry in each succeeding era must remain intimately connected with its essential core- the divinely given presence of Christ Jesus and the truth of his word by which alone we live. The challenge for pastors in every generation is to link the person and work of Jesus to every shifting era by means of his unchanging word- not to contextualize the message, but to textualize people into the text of Scripture, you could say." (17)

• "The essence of pastoral work is to bring the gifts of the Good Shepherd to his sheep and lambs. And here's the well from which you can draw inexhaustible grace every day as a pastor: In the church the Holy Spirit daily and richly forgives all your sins along with the sins of all believers." (19)

• "That's what it means to be a servant of Christ. You get your hands dirty among his earthly- and earthy- people. But you do it because you have life in your hands to give them." (25)

• "So right up front, let's start with this foundational definition: As a pastor you're above all else a true servant of Christ and steward of God's mysteries. Let that identity- that habitus- dictate everything you do and say in ministry. Then you yourself will be well served as you serve others in Jesus' name."(26)

• "What you might consider mundane routine is the very heart of your calling: to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ and to administer his life-giving sacraments. Preaching, baptizing, communing may be ordinary and God-ordained- but they are never dull." (29)

• "Have you come to realize that by your own reason or strength you can accomplish absolutely nothing in the ministry." (29)

• "Christianity is nothing more than the life and truth that God has disclosed and transmitted through the incarnate flesh of Jesus, his eternal Son." (31)

• "Pastors impart teaching that comes from the Holy Spirit of God and they bring that divinely given teaching to people who have received the Holy Spirit by faith." (33)

• "To be an agent and emissary of Jesus energizes and empowers you for active work as his servant. Just think: Christ Jesus, your Savior and your Lord, has called and commissioned you to love and serve the very sheep and lambs for whom he shed his blood and gave his life." (35)

II. What is a Pastor? The Classical Model

• "The text of sacred Scripture is at the heart of all pastoral work; the core of what we do in the diagnosis and sure of souls revolves around the word of God in written and verbal form because these in turn flow from Christ, who is the word of God made flesh." (45)

• "One divine word- incarnate, spoken, written- this is the word that you and I bring to God's people yet today as we go about the care of souls. And in that word there is life- the life of Christ for all humanity. That's why everything we do as pastors we do by means of the word of God." (56)

• "All ministry with the written word is ultimately the ministry of the one word of the Father made flesh for us and for our salvation."(56)

III. The Cure of Souls: Attentive Diagnosis

• "So the process of the cure of souls has two phases: attentive diagnosis followed by intentional treatment." (67)

• "Whenever someone is asking for my help I give them my rapt and undivided attention." (72)

• "Probably the most important skill to acquire is the art of listening to the conscience- listening accurately and spiritually, beneath the surface." (77)

• "Let's interact conversationally, responding to questions naturally and then asking our own questions appropriately." (79)

IV. The Cure of Souls: Intentional Treatment

• "Two things are indispensable, then, when it comes to serving as a spiritual physician: being attentive and being intentional. Faithful diagnosis and cure includes both. First we pay attention in Jesus' name, accurately assessing what threatens faith. Then we speak in Jesus' name, intentionally treating the underlying ailment with his healing word." (99)

• "All prayer is essentially answering speech; we as the children of God repeat back to him the word he has spoken to us. The first step in such word-based prayer is simply to echo what he has told us, repeating back to him what he has promised or commanded in that word." (106)

• "The Lord God, who has (insert his creative, redeeming and sanctifying power here) give you his blessing that you may (find required help, comfort, strength, etc.) for (purpose)- and the blessing of God Almighty: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" be with you now and forever." (109)

V. Sheep-Dogging and Shepherding: The Noble Task

• "There's nothing more important than to know Christ- that is, to believe in him and so receive life eternal in the life still to come as well as like in all its fullness already now. Everything else in all the world is peripheral to that; this alone is central." (125)

• "The New Testament word for conscience is syneidese. From its cognates this word means "to know together with," referring to a soul's perception of its standing before God. Conscience is not so much a moral compass as it is an umpire, or the capacity to see oneself as God sees you. It's conscious sensitivity toward God's judgment and grace." (128)

• "Our task as spiritual physicians is to treat bad consciences, continually delivering the healing balm of the living word of God and his life-giving sacraments." (129)

VI. Guilt and Shame

• "Remember, guilt has to do with behavior, shame has to do with being and identity. Believing himself to be disqualified as a son, he hoped to be hired as a servant instead." (140)

• "Baptism happens only once. But its significance goes on and on. For the rest of their life, every baptized child of God goes on dying and rising every day. Dying to sin but rising to righteousness, the sin addict dies and is raised again and again to live no longer as a slave but as a son within the Father's house." (149)

• "Once hiding in shame and broken by guilt, the soul emerges to live and love in wholeness and purity, made right again and purified by the shed blood of Jesus, the holy, sinless Lamb of God who was made to be sin for us that in him we might be made the righteousness of God." (152)

VII. Holiness and the Cure of Souls

• "In all your work, then, be conscious that you are nothing more- and nothing less- than an emissary of Jesus Christ." (157)

• "Sexual chastity is the gift of God's Spirit by which the powerful force of sex is first contained and then redirected, harnessed, you might say, for godly purposes. So abstinence apart from marriage and faithfulness within it is not the impossible dream, but a blessed reality for the man who in co-operation with the Holy Spirit uses his masculinity in service of God and his neighbor." (175)

VIII. Drawing Near to God: Proximity and Holiness

• "When I speak of liturgical living I mean that everything we have to give as Christians we first receive from God by entering repeatedly into his presence." (188)

• "What's true in Christian worship is also true in Christian living. There's a liturgical shape to the Christian life as well as our worship." (188)

• "Just as you and I cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ our Lord- or even come to him, so we cannot by our own works or effort make ourselves holy. Ours is an inherent, but derived holiness." (191)

IX. Invisible PowersL Spiritual Warfare

• "You've got to pay closer attention to invisible things. Behind every complication and difficulty encountered by pastors and churches, yes by every Christian, lurk the machinations and intentions of the Evil One. The devil is the sworn enemy of Christ and his church." (197)

• "Word and prayer go together for any Christian, but especially for pastors. That's why a rich life of prayer and meditation is essential" (202)

• "Jesus shows us in the Our Father how to pray as he does. He lists all the primary concerns: God's name, his kingdom, his will, our daily bread, and the forgiveness of our sins. Then significantly he concludes with two petitions that focus our attention on the spiritual battle that we're daily engaged in." (204)

X. Christ's "Other Sheep": Mission and the Care of Souls

• "Pastors are increasingly pressured to make a choice. They can either be an evangelist or a shepherd, a missionary or a pastor. Likely you've faced some pressure on this yourself either overtly or subtly, asked to choose between two options that are actually false alternatives." (221)

• "Too many sermons stop short of preaching Jesus; they are content to preach about Jesus instead." (227)

• "Christians are not called to be secret agents operation incognito, but witnesses for their Lord and Savior by their words and example." (230)

XI. The Shepherding of Shepherds

• "Everyone needs a disciplined approach to prayer." (242)

• "First the Spirit instructs us by his word and then he calls forth our reflection, thanksgiving, confession, and intercession in answer to that word." (250)

XII. Always Be Steady: Equilibrium in Ministry

• "Take courage, then, for the task before you. A pastoral habitus brings enduring joy. The work may seem exhausting, but repose awaits: rest eternal, sight unending, love undying, praise eternally resounding." (274)

Conclusion: Joy in Office

• "Love and joy are inseparably bound together in the inscrutable will of God." (279)

• "When God's love is in motion, there is joy even in the midst of sorrow." (280)

Notable Content

• Four Guideposts for Pastoral Conversation: (79-91)

  1. Faith

  2. Providence

  3. Holiness

  4. Repentance

• How to Bless:

  • As a servant of Christ you're authorized to bestow by means of a blessing any promise God makes in his word. Each blessing begins with God because he is always the actor, and the suffering soul the recipient. For example: "The Lord God, who has (insert his creative, redeeming and sanctifying power here) give you his blessing that you may (find required help, comfort, strength, etc.) for (purpose)- and the blessing of God Almighty: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" be with you now and forever." (109)

Notes on *Words of Life*

Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God, Timothy Ward (IVP, 2009)

Main Idea/Takeaway

When we read the words of Scripture we encounter God in action to reveal himself and redeem sinners through Jesus Christ.

• "The kind of doctrine of Scripture this book will outline is one that aims to demonstrate that its every aspect is shaped from the bottom up by the character and actions of God, and is integrally related to God's being and action, yet without the inert book coming to eclipse the living Savior." (17)

• "To encounter the words of Scripture is to encounter God in action." (48)

• "Scripture is God in communicative action. Therefore to encounter the words of Scripture is to encounter God in action." (177)

Interaction 

• To obey/disobey God's words is to obey/disobey God himself. (27)

• Central to how we live like Jesus is real is our attentiveness to his word. Our everyday embrace of Jesus's realness is seen in how we relate to His word. (28)

• God's actions as an extension of himself. (31)

• Trusting God's words is trusting God. (32)

• Human language. (34)

• See Packer's "Fundamentalism and the Word of God." (41)

• The organizing principle. (48)

• How to think of 'doctrine' of Scripture. (51)

• The covenantal nature of our relationship with God. (52)

• Bible as a covenant book. (55)

• When we hear the apostolic word. (60)

• God is the source of all reliable meaning. (64)

• This is not a "canon within a canon," but rather is to say that, because of redemption history, some books are more relevant to the church's life, and the content of the gospel." (85)

• What is verbal God-breathedness? Prepositions are breathed out by God in light of the speech act. (86)

• Amazing implication for translatability. (90)

• Defense of the NIV. (91)

• The inner testimony of the Holy Spirit.(93)

• While we never shrink back from rational proofs, we are supernaturalists and should never pretend otherwise.(94)

• cf. Vanhoozer 'First Theology.' (95)

• When we read the words of Scripture, we encounter God in action. (95)

• We deny the sufficiency of Scripture when we suppose the Spirit to work apart from the Word. (112)

• Primary matters: salvation, life, holiness. Secondary: worship, government, etc. (112)

• Word & Spirit. Nothing more is needed, and nothing less. (113)

• Foundational to preaching. (121)

• On "Preaching in worship and as worship"- This is connected to the bigger question of Who is God?! And his revelation. And what is Scripture? (122)

• Sufficiency means that nothing more or less than Word & Spirit is needed to receive God's revelation (& its purpose to save). Clarity means nothing more or less than Word & Spirit is needed to understand God's revelation ( & its purpose to save). (129)

Table of Contents

I. Introduction

II. God and Scripture: a biblical outline

III. The Trinity and Scripture: a theological outline

IV. The Attributes of Scripture: a doctrinal outline

V. The Bible and Christian life: the doctrine of Scripture applied

VI. Summary

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

I. Introduction

• "Throughout Christian history, the overwhelmingly predominant view of the Bible has been that it is itself the living and active Word of God. To say that the Bible is the Word of God is to say, putting it another way, that 'what the Bible says, God says'." (9)

• "We do not have to choose between 'believing in the Bible' and 'believing in Christ.' As Christians we are called on to do both. In fact one crucial means by which we demonstrate our faith in Christ is by also believing what the Bible says. Perhaps the most straightforward argument for this begins by observing the fact that Jesus himself treated the Jewish Scriptures, our Old Testament, as themselves words from God, and so if we are going to be devoted to him then we must make sure our view of the Scriptures is the same as his." (11)

II. God and Scripture: a biblical outline

• "Thus an action of God can be appropriately described both y saying that God's Word has performed an action for which he sent it, and by saying that God himself has performed an action." (25)

• "Thus, when Adam and Eve disobey God's spoken command , they fracture their relationship with God himself. From God's side, when the words of his command are set aside by his creatures in favor of their own desires and their own claims of wisdom, then God himself has been set aside." (27)

• "Abraham's response to God's words simply is also a response to God himself. His obedience to and trust in God's words are also, at one and the same time, an obedience to and trust in God himself." (28)

• "To trust God's covenant promise is not to enter into an agreement with an absentee God; it is to trust the God who has come to you. There is, then, a complex but real relationship between God and his actions, expressed and performed, as they are, through God's words. In philosophical terms, there is an ontological relationship between God and his words. It seems that God's actions, including his verbal actions, are a kind of extension of him." (31)

• "Communication from God is therefore communion with God, when met with a response of trust from us." (32)

• "God speaks to us human words of promise, such that for us to trust those words is in itself an act of trusting God himself." (32)

• "Whatever else may be true of human language, it is quite reasonable to suppose that it has the ability to speak truly of God, both because it was given to us by a God who speaks within himself as eternally three speaking persons, and also because our possession of language, as made in God's image, is analogous to God's communicative capacity. Our language can be made by God to speak truthfully of him because our language has its origin in him and in some way is like his own." (34-35)

• "This philosophical assertion continues, sometimes unconsciously and therefore unquestioned, to shape much contemporary rejection of the orthodox doctrine of Scripture. At root, the rejection of Scripture as divine special revelation is often a side effect of the greater rejection of the particularity of Christ as God's ultimate self-revelation in the world. Here should be noted a feature that underlies many discussions about Scripture: people's view of Scripture is often largely determined by their view of Jesus Christ. That is one practical reason why the doctrine of Scripture must be articulated in a way that makes explicit its dependance on the doctrine of Christ." (41)

• "Therefore everyone who never met the Word incarnate directly, bit who hears the words of Christ from the disciples, nevertheless encounters the words of the Father and of Christ, who in those words present themselves to us as a covenant-making God." (42)

• "Thus to reject the disciples' words, which come from Christ and are about Christ, is to reject God, and so to be liable for condemnation." (42)

• "God has identified himself both with Jesus Christ in person and with the passing on by his disciples of the words Jesus brought from the Father, with the result that to reject those human words spoken by the disciples is to reject God." (42)

III. The Trinity and Scripture: a theological outline

• "Perfection, necessity, sufficiency, clarity, inspiration and authority. Analysis of the Bible under these headings, as the primary way in which Scripture is described theologically, does indeed sometimes pass too quickly over the complexity of scriptural testimony and teaching on the nature and function of the Bible in relation to God and his purposes." (50)

• "Here we are still very much engaged in the vital task of describing Scripture explicitly at every point in the light of the character and actions of God, as revealed and witnessed to in Scripture." (51)

• "In the overarching narrative of Scripture the two great actions of the Father, following the glory of his creative act and the tragedy of the fall of humankind, are to redeem and to reveal." (52)

• "Commandments declare the stipulations of the covenant. Prophecy and epistles, in particular, expound and apply those stipulations in specific contexts; they are, in effect, the covenant preached in different situations. Narrative relates the unfolding events in which God's people have successfully trusted and rejected him, and through which God has faithfully enacted the consequences of his promises , whether in blessing or judgment." (55)

• "Psalms give exemplary forms in which a believer can address God in many situations in life while remaining faithfully within the covenant, whether one is full of praise for experience of blessing, or confused and despairing over God's apparent failure to keep his promises. And apocalyptic writing demonstrates graphically the full reality of the present and ultimate consequences of either blessing or cursing that follows from obedience or disobedience to the covenant." (55)

• "Yet to see the Bible as 'the book of the covenant' is not simplistic or reductionist. It is rather to recognize Scripture's profound role in the relationship between humanity and God that God wants to establish." (56)

• "A very high claim for Scripture is of course being made here: Scripture is an aspect of the action of the sovereign, faithful, self-revealing God in the world, and specifically it is the action by which this God declares his ongoing covenant with his people, climaxed in Christ." (56)

• "The strong bonds between ourselves, our actions and the words by which we perform many of our actions is evident in the normal course of life. This is particularly so when we think about the responses that can be made to a promise. For you to say 'I trust you to keep your promise' or 'I trust your promise' or 'I trust your words' is in effect to say the same thing in regard to me. For you to distrust the words of my promise is simply to distrust me. Persons and actions are so intimately identified in interpersonal relationships that actions begin to look like an extension of our personhood in our relationships with others." (59)

• "Those who rejected the apostolic proclamation of the gospel of Christ thereby made themselves liable to God's condemnation, because in rejecting those words they had rejected God. Similarly, to hear the words of Christ was directly to hear the speech of God. It follows that to speak of Scripture as the book of the covenant, the ongoing form in which God repeats his covenant promise in the world, ought to lead us to speak of Scripture as in some sense a mode of God's presence in the world." (60)

• "As we have seen, we as persons who act in relation to one another are so invested in our words that, by speaking, we act upon both ourselves and one another (e.g. in making you a promise I acquire for myself the responsibility to keep my promise and ascribe to you the obligation to take me at my word, other things being equal). It follows that what you do to my words (to my actions as performed by my words) you do to me." (63)

• "A speech act can be as short as a single word ('Go!'), or as long as a unified collection of books (the Bible as God's covenant promise in writing). Therefore when we speak of Scripture as a mode of God's presence, we are asserting that it is in the speech acts of Scripture that God reveals himself by being semantically present to us, as he promises, warns, rebukes, reassures and so on. And this revelation is happening when the words of Scripture are read: when God is performing again, through the reading of Scripture, the same action he performed through those words when they were first written." (66)

• "Turretin's response was that 'Christ is our only teacher, in such a sense as that the ministry of the word is not thereby excluded, but necessarily included because now in it only he addresses us ad by it he instructs us." (71)

• "Scripture's words are 'Word' not just because he sent them and speaks through them, but also because its words are his actions, the present word-actions of the Word." (71)

• "We should read, listen to and hear it preached, in order to find ourselves presented again with Christ and addressed by him. As we encounter the words of Scripture, we are encountering the Son in action, presenting himself to us in his call on us to take up our cross and follow him." (72)

• "God's aim in Scripture is to lead us to true devotion to Christ, and obedience to him and love for him, impinging on every area of life and thought." (73)

• "To speak of Scripture as in itself divine is therefore to speak of the divine origin of the speech acts of Scripture, a characteristic that follows from their identity as God's speech acts." (78)

• "Because of the unity of the Father and the Son in revelation and redemption, Scripture is at the same time the word by which the incarnate and ascended Word, the one in whom all God's covenant promises are fulfilled, continues to act and to present himself semantically so that he may be known in the world over which he has all authority." (78)

• "Because the whole of Scripture is breathed-out by God, every part needs to be interpreted in the light of its place in the history of salvation that Scripture unfolds, and in its literary context." (85)

• "Verbal inspiration claims that the Bible says exactly what God wants to say because the Holy Spirit was responsible for every word written in Scripture. He is the divine Author behind the human authors." (86)

• "It is the speech acts of Scripture (its units of meaning: sentences, paragraphs and books) that have their origin in divine authorship, because authors primarily author speech acts. The individual words are inspired (spoken out by God) to the extent that they come together to express these speech acts." (86)

• "Crucial to the Reformers' view of this action of the Spirit is that his illuminating work took place not through the church but through Scripture." (93)

• "Whenever we encounter the speech acts of Scripture, we encounter God himself in action. The Father presents himself to us as a God who makes and keeps his Covenant promises. The Son comes to us as the Word of God, knowable to us through his words. The Spirit ministers these words to us, illuminating our minds and hearts, so that in receiving, understanding and trusting them, we receive, know and trust God himself." (95)

IV. The Attributes of Scripture: a doctrinal outline

• "Thus a verbal revelation is absolutely necessary if humanity is to know God as he truly is, and to be able to enter into a saving knowledge of God." (101)

• "If Scripture alone is claimed to be the supreme authority in Christian thinking and living, that is because both its content (the verbal revelation) and its form (the written Scriptures) are indispensable." (102)

• "The whole pattern of God's self-revelation is that he establishes a covenant relationship between himself and his people, and this is a relationship in which he makes himself known. He does not reveal himself exhaustively, but the God he shows himself to be in his covenant relationship is the God he really is." (104)

• "The reality of the Trinity, and the purpose of the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension are sufficiently complex that they cannot be mimed or communicated through a religious impulse or sensation; they need to be spoken." (104)

• "In the light of this, I would define the sufficiency of Scripture in this way: because of the ways in which God has chosen to relate himself to Scripture, Scripture is sufficient as the means by which God continues to present himself to us such that we can know him, repeating through Scripture the covenant promise he has brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ." (113)

• "Human finitude, and particularly sin, are the reasons for our lack of understanding of Scripture, rather than the cause being in some lack of clarity attributable to Scripture itself." (116)

• "Expository biblical preaching in fact assumes rather than denies the clarity of Scripture. An expository preacher takes it that his sermon can be judged as either a faithful or an unfaithful exposition of Scripture by his hearers, as they discern for themselves whether his teaching is or is not warranted by his biblical text. His appeal is not 'My teaching is true because I'm an officially appointed preacher' nor is it as heart 'My teaching is true because I am a Spirit-filled and Spirit-anointed preacher.' Those two factors may give added weight to his teaching, but at heart the implied claim of the expository preacher is instead 'My teaching is true because it can be openly seen that what I am saying is in line with the meaning of Scripture'." (121)

• "The preacher is not doing something with Scripture that the hearer by definition cannot do, which would be the case if the preacher were appealing primarily to special spiritual anointing or to his holding of an office in the church." (122)

• "The authority of Scripture is dependent entirely on the authority of God, and comes about only because of what God has chosen to do in the way he authored Scripture, and because of what he continues to do in presenting himself to us through Scripture as a God we can know and trust."

• "It commits us to giving the Bible the sovereign place in our lives that must follow from its central place in relation to God and in his actions." (129)

• "The idea that the Bible is 'infallible' means that it does not deceive. To say that the Bible is 'inerrant' is to make the additional claim that it does not assert any errors of fact: whether the Bible refers to events in the life of Christ, or to other details of history and geography, what it asserts is true."

V. The Bible and Christian life: the doctrine of Scripture applied

• "Preaching goes as tragically astray when it muses and reflects on those matters it should be proclaiming, as it does when it confidently proclaims what the preacher cannot know, because Scripture is silent." (158)

• "For example, if as a preacher I am hesitant that the Spirit will come and act supremely through my preaching of the speech acts of Scripture because he once authored them and is alive to speak to them again, then my preaching, if it is to be proclamatory, will probably take one of two forms. I might end up recommending my own spiritual experience as normative, perhaps using some biblical texts to illustrate my experience, by way of historical precedent. Or I might focus on rehearsing the beliefs and practices of my Christian subculture or denomination, which distinguish us from other groups, with the Bible again reduced to serving as a doctrinal sourcebook, or as a handbook of practical illustrations." (158)

• "To claim that one's own human speech about Christ crucified really is God speaking, and that the Holy Spirit comes in power through one's apparently weak speech, seems to run dangerously close to blasphemy. Yet that is clearly the pattern for the extension of the gospel after Pentecost that Christ and the apostles established."(159)

• "The New Testament precedent is simply that the preacher can preach and must preach, fearful and trembling because he is given the privilege of speaking God's words and has no power to determine the result of his preaching, but not so fearful that he loses his resolves to know and proclaim Christ and him crucified." (159)

• "The Spirit's activity through the speech acts of the Bible now is consistent with his activity in their composition at the level of grammar and meanings back then. The Spirit, as the Spirit of Christ, navigates the church into the future by calling it back to the written Word he authored." (161)

• "In the light of this, what the faithful biblical preacher does, and what the Holy Spirit does with Scripture through him, is best described as a contemporary re-enactment of the speech act that the Spirit performed in the original authoring of the text. This notion, that the sermon is itself a redemptive act of God in the present, is common in literature on preaching." (162)

• "A biblical text written, for example, to instil in its first readers and hearers a confident hope that at the future coming of Christ their perseverance in the faith will be vindicated performs that same action again in the lives of contemporary believers. It does so in a sermon if the preacher is faithful to the purpose of the original text, and fashions his sermon not just as a speech about hope, but as itself a hope-inspiring action." (163)

• "The Spirit is again graciously present in the preached message, if what is preached now is faithful in purpose and content to what he once inspired." (163)

• "Properly faithful biblical preaching involves the preacher deliberately seeking to fashion every verbal (and indeed physical) aspect of his preaching in such a way that the Spirit may act through his words in the lives of his hearers, ministering the content of Scripture in accordance with the purpose of Scripture." (163)

• "The preacher with a Christian congregation is therefore not bringing something fundamentally new in his sermon. Of course he should be teaching aspects of the biblical faith they are still unaware of, but he is only bringing to light for them from Scripture what is already true of them, explaining more of the truth that is already theirs. At heart he is reminding them of the one thing that has been undeniably true of them ever since they first devoted themselves to the apostolic gospel: that by the work of the Spirit of God they are not what they once were." (169)

• "Good preaching exercises something of a 'credal' function in the local church, giving people an interpretative structure in which to make sense of individual parts of Scripture when they encounter them for themselves." (172)

• "What we expect from Scripture must be determined entirely by what Scripture is, and the purpose for which God has caused it to be written."(174)

• "The norms of grammatical and historical interpretation are not avoided. But interpretation is not an end in itself; reading the Bible is not fundamentally a comprehension exercise. Interpretation should serve only to lead us to an encounter with God as he actually presents himself to us in Scripture." (175)

VI. Summary

• "He gives us Scripture as our word of life: the trustworthy, clear and sufficient means of knowing him and remaining in covenant relationship with him, in the power of the Holy Spirit, right up until the day we shall no longer need it, because then we shall see face to face." (179)

Notable Content

• The Reformers view of the work of the Word and Spirit together was an argument directed in three directions at once: (93)

  1. Against Roman Catholicism, it asserted that the Spirit required the church only as an instrument, not as the actual dynamic, by which people came to faith.

  2. Negatively against the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, it asserted that the Spirit regularly illuminated minds through the content of the written Word.

  3. Positively, it served to demonstrate the faithfulness and consistency of God in revelation.

Notes on *Fundamentalism and the Word of God*

Fundamentalism and the Word of God, J. I. Packer (IVP, 1958)

Spurgeon: “Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion.”

Main Idea

Evangelical theology, in line with historic Christian doctrine, believes the Bible is the word of God, and should be thus defended against the assaults of Liberalism/subjectivism.

• "In fact, the cause of the division is, from one point of view, the deepest doctrinal divergence of all- disagreement as to the principle of authority: for there can be no stable agreement on anything between those who disagree here. Through treating the position of Evangelicals as mere bits and pieces and failing to ask why they believe the things they do believe, the critics have misses this issue altogether. Yet it is the heart of the controversy, and it is here that our discussion must center." (17)

• "The scriptural approach to Scripture is thus to regard it as God's written testimony to Himself. When we call the Bible the Word of God, we mean, or should mean, that its message constitutes a single utterance of which God is the author. What Scripture says, He says. When we hear or read Scripture, that which impinges on our mind (whether we realize it or not) is the speech of God Himself." (89)

• "Evangelicals, it is said, cling to the idea of biblical infallibility as drowning men cling to a straw- not because it is worthy of their trust, but because they want something to cling to and there is nothing else within reach. We can now see how perverse a misunderstanding this is. the evangelical certainty of the trustworthiness and authority of Scripture is of exactly the same sort, and rests on exactly the same basis, as the Church's certainty of the Trinity, or the incarnation, or any other catholic doctrine. God has declared it; Scripture embodies it; the Spirit exhibits it to believers; and they humbly receive it, as they are bound to do." (122)

• "We have seen what the real issues are: the authority of Christ and of Scripture; the relation between the Bible and reason; the method of theology, and the meaning of repentance; the choice between Evangelicalism and Subjectivism." (176)

Interaction

• The question of Scripture is really, "What think ye of Christ?" (59)

• The message of Scripture is Jesus. He is the key. (84)

• See Vanhoozer, "First Theology" (86)

• JIP is suspicious of the Biblical Theology movement in its earliest days, c.1950s. (155)

• Liberalism repeats the same assault on Christianity that has been since its beginning: the contribution of sinful man to the work of Christ, which obscures Christ's glory. (173)

• We, following the Reformation heritage, must oppose Liberalism today as the Reformers opposed Medieval Catholicism. (173)

Table of Contents

Foreword
I. 'Fundamentalists' under Fire
II. What is 'Fundamentalism'?
III. Authority
IV. Scripture
V. Faith
VI. Reason
VII. Liberalism
VIII. Conclusion

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Foreword:

This book is a constructive re-statement of evangelical principles, aiming to fix the right approach to the Bible.

I. Fundamentalists Under Fire

• Liberal critics are not going after mere evangelical practice, but actual principle. They consider the idea of biblical inerrancy to be unreasonable in our modern times.

• And many of these critics blame Fundamentalists for being too parochial. They consider them to not get everything wrong — they’re not heretics — but they need to adjust a few things here and there. “If only Fundementalists would abandon their isolationism and come into these [more mainline] movements!”

• JIP calls this analysis just flat wrong ...

  • “It reflects two characteristic weaknesses of ecumenical theology. The first is the tendency to treat every theological tradition as no more than a loosely linked collection of isolated insights, brought together by the mere accident of history. But the evangelical faith is a systematic and integrated whole, built on a single foundation; and they must be understood and assessed as such. ... [there actually is a major doctrinal issue separating the two sides, Mainlines and Fundamentalists] ... in fact, the cause of the division is, from one point of view, the deepest doctrinal divergence of all – disagreement as to the principle of authority: there could be no stable agreement on anything between those who disagree here. Through treating the position of evangelicals as mere bits and pieces and failing to ask why they believe the things that they do believe, the critics have missed this issue altogether. Yet it is the heart of the controversy, and it is here to our discussion must center.” (17)

• “Our first task must be to test all the words of men by the authoritative Word of God, to receive only what Scripture endorses, and to reject all that is contrary to it.” (19)

II. What Is Fundamentalism?

On the connection between Christology and the doctrine of Scripture. As Timothy Ward also says, "people's view of Scripture is often largely determined by their view of Jesus Christ" (Words of Life, 41).

Matthew 5:17–18,

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

III. Authority

• “The real question concerns the principle of authority.” (41)

• “The problem of authority is the most fundamental problem that the Christian church ever faces. This is because Christianity is built on truth: that is to say, on the content of a divine revelation. Christianity announces salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, in and through whom that revelation came to completion; but faith in Jesus Christ is possible only where the truth concerning him is known.” (42)

• Two classes of doctrinal division:

  • 1) a common view of the Bible as the final authority, but different only as to what it teaches

  • 2) divided views on authority, such as Protestants and Rome; (same would apply to Evangelicals and Liberals)

• There are three distinct authorities to which final appeal might be made:

  • Holy Scripture (Evangelical)

  • Church Tradition (Rome)

  • Christian Reason (Liberal)

• Evangelical view of authority:

  • “To learn the mind of God, one must consult His written Word. What Scripture says, God says. The Bible is inspired in the sense of being word-for-word God-given.” 47

  • “The proper ground for believing a thing is that God says it in His written Word, and a readiness to take God’s word and accept what he asserts in the Bible is thus fundamental to faith.” 49

• The Teaching of Jesus:

  • “The fact we have to face is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, who claimed divine authority for all that he did and taught, both confirmed the absolute authority of the Old Testament for others and submitted to it unreservedly himself.” (55)

  • “In conjunction with the teachings of Jesus, the written word of the Old Testament retains is full, divine authority. Attempts have been made by some who reject Christ’s view of the Old Testament to evade the force of this conclusion. This could be done only by denying Christ’s authority altogether. Christ’s claim to be divine is either true or false. If it is true, his person guarantees the truth of all the rest of his teaching (for a divine person cannot lie or err); therefore, his view of the Old Testament is true. If his claim is false, there is no compelling reason to believe anything else that he said. If we accept Christ’s claims, therefore, we commit ourselves to believe all that he taught—on this authority. If we refuse to believe some part of what he taught, we are in effect denying him to be the divine Messiah – on our own authority. The question, “What think ye of the Old Testament?”, resolves into the question, “What think ye of Christ?” And our answer to the first proclaims our answer to the second.” (59)

• “The apostles clearly grasped their Master’s of teaching about Scripture. They proclaimed Christianity as the fulfillment of Scripture. They preached the authority of Christ on the basis of the authority of the Old Testament. They argued from Scripture, quoting its words as the speech of God. Indeed, they laid claim to the Old Testament as a Christian book. The oracles of God, entrusted to the Jews, had been written primarily, they maintained, for the benefit of Christian believers. ‘Whatsoever things were written beforehand were written for our learning.’ The events in the wilderness in Moses’s day ‘were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.’ The prophets who spoke of the sufferings and glory of Christ ‘were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you.’ The reckoning of righteousness to believing Abraham was recorded ‘not for his sake alone, but for ours also.’ The Old Testament Scripture were ‘able to make you wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.’ To Christians, who held the key to its meaning, the Old Testament was luminous, though to those who veiled their hearts by refusing to find its meaning in Christ it remained obscure.” *(62-62)

  • Rom 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11; 1 Peter 1:12, Rom 4:23; 2 Tim 3:15

• “Apostolic utterances are the truth of Christ and possess the authority of Christ; they are to be received as words of God, because what they convey is, in fact, the word of God.” 64

• “To deny the normative authority of Scripture over the church is the misconceive the nature of Christianity, and, in effect, to deny the Lordship of Christ. If the teaching of Christ and the apostles is to rule the church, the church must be ruled by Scripture.” (69)

• “The words and lives of Christian men must be in continual process of reformation by the written Word of their God.” (69)

• “We may never assume the complete rightness of our own established ways of thought and practice and excuse ourselves the duty of testing and reforming them by Scripture.” (70)

• “Scripture has complete and final authority over the church as a self-contained, self interpreting revelation from God. This is what evangelicals are concerned above all to maintain. What Scripture says, God says; and what God says in Scripture is to be the rule of faith and life in his church.” (73)

IV. Scripture

• Scripture itself is alone competent to judge our doctrine of Scripture (76)

• The Divine Origin of Scripture:

  • "Inspiration is to be defined as a supernatural, providential influence of God's Holy Spirit upon the human authors which caused them to write what He wished to be written for the communication of revealed truth to others." (77)

• "The Bible excludes the idea of a frustrated Deity. 'Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth. He was well able to prepare, equip and overrule sinful human writers so that they wrote nothing but what He intended; and Scripture tells us that this is what in fact He did. We are to think of the Spirit's inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term) concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers' own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God's work." (80)

• "But it is more than a library of books by human authors; it is a single book with a single author — God the Spirit — a single theme — God the Son, and the Father's saving purposes, which all revolve round Him. Our Lord is therefore the key to Scripture, and its focal center; there is a sense in which all bears witness of Him, and in this common reference the heterogenous contents of the Bible find their unity. Not that all parts of Scripture are equally important, or witness to Chris and the kingdom of God in the same way. But no part of Scripture is without its bearing on these central topics, and no part of Scripture is rightly understood if read without its reference." (84-85).

• "The biblical concept of Scripture, then, is of a single, though complex, God-given message, set down in writing in God-given words; a message which God has spoken and still speaks." (88)

• "Leave man to guess God's mind and purpose, and he will guess wrong; he can know it only by being told it. Moreover, the whole purpose of God's mighty acts is to bring man to know Him by faith' and Scripture knows no foundation for faith but the spoken word of God, inviting our trust in Him on the basis of what He has done for us. Where there is no word from God, faith cannot be." (92)

• "God's Word is affirmed to be infallible because God Himself is infallible; the infallibility of Scripture is simply the infallibility of God speaking. What Scripture says is to be received as the infallible Word of the infallible God, and to assert biblical inerrancy and infallibility is just to confess faith in (i) the divine origin of the Bible and (ii)the truthfulness and trustworthiness of God." (96)

• "The authority of Christ requires us to receive as God's Word all that the Bible asserts. No other attitude to biblical assertions is theologically warrantable." (100)

• "God's Word is not presented in Scripture in the form of a theological system, but it admits of being stated in that form, an, indeed, requires to be so stated before we can properly grasp it- grasp it, that is, as a whole. Every text has its immediate context in the passage from which it comes, its broader context in the book to which it belongs, and its ultimate context in the Bible as a whole; and it needs to be rightly related to each of these contexts if its character, scope, and significance is to be adequately understood." (101)

• "Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him." (104)

• "Christians are bound to receive the Bible as God's Word written on the authority of Christ, not because they can prove it such by independent enquiry, but because as disciples they trust their divine Teacher." (108)

• "But without the Spirit's help there can be no grasp of the message of Scripture, no conviction of the truth of Scripture, and no faith in the God of Scripture. Without the Spirit, nothing is possible but spiritual blindness and unbelief." (112)

V. Faith

• "Just as the Spirit teaches all Christians to receive as authoritative articles of faith the doctrines which the Scriptures assert, so He teaches them to regard as an authoritative articles of faith the doctrines which the Scriptures assert, so He teaches them to regard as an authoritative source of doctrine the Scriptures which assert them." (121)

VI. Reason

• 'All truth is God's truth; facts, as such, are sacred, and nothing is more un-Christian than to run away from them." (127)

• "Whereas the non-Christian is led by faithless reason, the Christian should be guided by reasoning faith." (128)

• "Sinners are no more ready to acknowledge God in their thinking, by allowing His utterances authority over their judgment, than they are to acknowledge God in their actions, by allowing his utterances authority over their behavior." (139)

• "Christian believers, who acknowledge the authority of Christ as a Teacher in other matters, ought equally to acknowledge it in their approach to the Bible; they should receive Scripture as He did, accepting its claim to be divinely inspired and true and studying it as such." (141)

• "This is the only road to intellectual freedom, and its sole safeguard is the principle of absolute subjection to Scripture." (143)

• "If anyone in the present debate lacks intellectual freedom, it is rather those whose minds are governed by the tyrannical modern axiom that what is newest must be truest, what is old must be out-of date, and change is always progress; those who feel they must deny what Christ affirmed about Scripture rather than break with nineteenth- century ideas of what assumptions are 'scientific' and what are not; those in the grip of a theological neuroses that makes them regard rationalistic principles of biblical criticism as an inviolable sacred cow." (143-144)

VII. Liberalism

• "To defer to God's Word is an act of faith; any querying and editing of it on our own initiative is an exhibition of unbelief."(153)

• "To accept all is consistent; to reject all is consistent; but no third course is consistent." (163)

• "If man's judgment is to be the measure of some things in Scripture , why not of all things? If we are entitled to desupernaturalize the faith in part, why not altogether? It is hard to respect the liberal half-way houses, however much acuteness and learning goes into their erection; for they are arbitrary through and through." (163)

• "History shows that Christian witness is strong and effective only when believers are humble enough to believe nothing less about God than His own Word tells us." (163)

• "The apologetic strategy that would attract converts by the flattery of accommodating the gospel to the 'wisdom' of sinful man was condemned by Paul nineteen centuries ago, and the past hundred years have provided a fresh demonstration of its bankruptcy. The world may call its compromises 'progressive' and 'enlightened' (those are its names for all forms of thought that pander to its conceit); those who produce them will doubtless, by a natural piece of wishful thinking, call them 'bold' and 'courageous', and perhaps 'realistic' and 'wholesome'; but the Bible condemns them as sterile aberrations. And the Church cannot hope to recover its power till it resolves to turn its back on them." (168)

VIII. Conclusion

• "The Bible asks to be regarded as a God-given, error-free, self-interpreting unity, true and trustworthy in all that it teaches." (169)

• "The fact is that here we are faced in principle with a choice between historic Evangelicalism and modern Subjectivism."(170)

• "Once men reverse the proper relation between Scripture and their own thinking and start judging biblical statements about God by their private ideas of God, instead of vice versa, their knowledge of the Creator is in imminent danger of perishing, and with it the whole idea of supernatural redemption." (171-172)

• "Evangelical theology is bound to oppose the attitude which under-values the gift of Scripture and presumes to correct the inerrant Word of God, just as it will oppose all misguided endeavors to supplement by human merit the perfect righteousness of Christ."(174)

Notable Content

• Two classes of doctrinal division: (44)

  • 1) a common view of the Bible as the final authority, but different only as to what it teaches

  • 2) divided views on authority, such as Protestants and Rome; (same would apply to Evangelicals and Liberals)

• Packer is suspicious of the Biblical Theology Movement in its early days (see 151-160)

• Four reasons why Liberalism is faulty (see 160-163)