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 *Repentance*

Repentance: A Daring Call to Surrender, Jack Miller, (CLC Publications, 1975, 2009)

Note-taker’s Preface: The resurgence of gospel-centeredness over the last 20+ years is owed in large part, humanly speaking, to the ministries of men like Tim Keller. But behind his ministry is the influence of Jack Miller and Richard Lovelace, among others, who helped shaped Keller during his days at Westminster Seminary. You can see traces of the influence in the primary sources of Miller and Lovelace. For example, consider these words from Lovelace in Dynamics of Spiritual Life (1979):

The beginning place for personal renewal is a preaching and teaching ministry that emphasizes depth proclamation of the gospel. …We must first make real to them the grace of God in accepting them daily, not because of their spirituality, but because of the perfect righteousness of Christ. (211)

Have you ever heard a sermon from Tim Keller? This is precisely what Keller does, and it’s worth emulating, by God’s grace. As for Jack Miller, his work is as relevant for us now as it was 50 years ago. I think of A Faith Worth Sharing and Outgrowing the Ingrown Church. And, of course, there is his small book Repentance. This book is one that I’ve read and reread for years, together with other men. I will let it speak for itself:

Main Idea/Takeaway

• A life of daily repentance is vital for centering the gospel of God's undeserved grace in Christ.

Interaction 

• "Not to undermine asiety, but to emphasize the humility of covenant." (12)

• "Our works- for self-justification- are actually a criticism of God." (21)

• "Isaiah saw God!" (22)

• "Point to Christ as our only Mediator." (27)

• "Priesthood of believers." (27)

• "Consider repentance in light of new creation." (33)

• "Repentance is hearing again and again, "You're wrong and you're loved." (37)

• "Spirit-filled life: Love (affection & obedience); Humility (repentance everyday)." (41)

• "When the stress is experienced, the focus becomes more external, not of the heart." (42)

• "Spirit-filled life is repentant, not 'perfect'." (43)

• "cf. CSL on forgiveness: We are often harsher with other people's sin than we are our own."(43)

• "Which can only happen if we care more about what He thinks than we do what others think. If we care about what other's think, we'll only "repent" when our performance suffers, not our heart motives." (43)

• "I'm not. I can't. I won't. You are. You can. You will." (47)

• "God commands repentance." (61)

• "Far worse than we ever imagined, far more loved than we ever dared dream." (66)

• "How have we seen the power of guilt play out in people's lives? Our own?" (70)

• "Penance, self-reliance, guilt in 'gospel-centered' guise?" (77)

• "Counseling as expository in one-on-one...find those places to go." (79)

• "Consider the tonic of silence before God." (82)

• "So much of prayer is navigating through trifles (which is why it's hard)." (85)

• "Devil's tactic in you praying with fluency." (85)

• "Why collision matters: 1.) power of testimony; 2.) the tonic of silence before God, not prayerlessness. 3.) Compassion is a fruit of repentance. 4.) Because there is where we remember Jesus is real." (83)

• "Wash their feet." (86)

• "Beware the self-righteousness of gospel-centeredness. We're addicts at self-congratulations, (i.e., work progress)." (87)

• "Epilogue by Jack's widow , 1996." (98)

Table of Contents

Foreword

A Note to the Reader

I. Repentance: The Foundation of Life

II. Repentance and Its Counterfeit

III. What Is True Repentance?

IV. Repentance and the Spirit-filled Life

V. Repentance and the Carnal Christian

VI. Repentance and God's Mercy

VII. Repentance and Counseling

VIII. Repentance and Sharing Christ

Epilogue

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

I. Repentance: The Foundation of Life

• "What we all desperately need to see is that the love of a holy God is manifested covenantally at the cross. In the sacrifice of the Lamb of God, the Father promises to receive contrite sinners on a daily-no, hourly-basis." (11)

• "The Father, in the gift of His Son, has put Himself under eternal obligation to returning children. Having satisfied the demands of His own holy law, the Father/must open His mighty arms and embrace every returning child." (12)

• "To be near God and to have God near us is the whole purpose of human life. But without sincere repentance there can be no face-to-face fellowship with the Father of lights." (12)

• "Once tasted, repentance would speak to them of communion with Christ and of self-forgetting fruitfulness and of Kingdom power (Mark 1:15)." (13)

• "In our pride we would never think of ourselves in connection with Ananias and Sapphira. But our sin bears a very close resemblance to theirs. They wanted to pretend to be near God when they were not." (14)

• "The world of humanity in our generation has been dominated by lies, broken promises, shattered illusions and just general sham. People are sick and tired of role-players and plastic goods, slickly turned out and calculated to deceive. Therefore, if we wish to be effective, we must see that our own pharisaic pretense will eventually be discovered by the people we meet and rebuked by our own consciences." (15)

• "Ask the Holy Spirit to make you willing to be searched by God (Ps. 139:23-24). Do not expect the process of searching to be always painless and pleasant. No, hardly. But you will begin to have the joy of a clear conscience and a deepening fellowship with Christ." (16)

II. Repentance and Its Counterfeit

• "Penance is not merely a sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, it is a religious attitude deeply rooted in the human heart which prompts people to attempt to pay for their own sins by good works and sufferings. Self-justification is the goal of this effort." (17)

• "So long as we look within ourselves for the source of our life, we know nothing of Christ." (18)

• "What these people seek from God is enough grace to be strong in themselves. They do not need or want a constant flow of water from heaven." (19)

• "For truly repentant sinners have discovered, through the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, that all their doing is full of sin. Their doing is the source of their wretched emptiness, their black depression and their self-despising. But now they have come undone. They turn from their sinful doing and trust in what Christ has done." (20)

• "Penance is centered in human emotions and perceptions. But repentance to life is God-centered." (20)

• "As a natural consequence, those doing penance will God as owing them a debt; living in self-pity, they become almost unshakably convinced that if there is any forgiving to do, they must forgive God for making them such rotten sinners." (21)

• "Humanity has an immense pride. This is the basis of the self-pity which leads people to condemn God for what seems to them bad management of human affairs. But one real meeting with the living God puts all this self-righteous junk into its true perspective. You just don't argue with holy fire. You submit to it." (23)

• "For the sure mark of authentic repentance is boldness and joyous enthusiasm for the things of God." (23)

• "We are not to make men and women our own disciples, but to make them disciples of the Lord. Therefore, repentance means that people must turn from trusting in empty cisterns like ourselves and thirst and drink from Christ alone (John 7:37-38). Pastors and Christian workers are not merely to accept l believers this as an interesting insight which is mildly relevant to their work. It is, in fact, a matter of spiritual life and death." (27)

III. What Is True Repentance?

• "This motivation for changing one's mind and life-direction is the lordship of the crucified Savior." (31)

• "In the presence of this exalted Lord, self-defense is foolishness, but self-examination aided by the Holy Spirit is everything. Stated practically, our self-examination before the Lord must deal with two kinds of sins. For the purpose of easier understanding, we shall call one kind branch-sins and the other root-sins." (33)

• "Be encouraged then, fellow believer. In calling you to daily repentance, the Lord Jesus is not simply giving you good advice. He is saying, "If you are mine, you must continue to repent.'" (37)

• "Take care not to rob someone of "godly grief" over sin. For if you rob them of the grief, you will also rob them of the joy which comes as a consequence of a hearty repentance." (39)

IV. Repentance and the Spirit-filled Life

• "I want to set down two closely related criteria for the Spirit-filled life: The first is sincere love to the Lord Jesus Christ as the gift of the Father's love, and the second is a genuine repentance which causes us to be broken down before God." (43)

• "For to have the Holy Spirit in you is to have more of Christ in you, to be more like Christ and to bear the fruit of the Spirit which comes through faith in Christ and His merits (Gal. 5:22-23)." (46)

• "There must be a daily conversion of the heart to God (Col. 2:6). And the more you deepen your repentance, the more room you have in your heart for the rivers of living water. The more you know that you are stained to the bone with selfish impulses, the more you see how you hold out against the will of the Lord, then the more you will go to Christ as a thirsty sinner who finds deeper cleansing, more life and greater joy through the Spirit." (47)

• "Repentance prepares the way so that the Lord of glory can enter into the spirit and be adored as the new center of heavenly life. Before, such people were consumed by self-love, but once the Spirit convicted them of sin and turned them to the cross, self-love was crowded out by love to the Lord Jesus Christ." (47)

V. Repentance and the Carnal Christian

• "Backsliding is not a category or a stage in Christian development, but it is living, unrepentant, in a state of sin on the part of those who know better." (51)

• "Definitely, elements of carnality still plague the new Christian. The same can be said of the mature believer. But so long as God's people continue to repent and cling to Christ for growth in grace, they are not carnal in the Pauline sense. They are going forward- sometimes only creeping on hands and knees- but they are not sliding backward like stubborn brute beasts." (52)

• "It should, therefore, be fully understood that in the New Testament the lordship of Christ is the basis of evangelism. It underlies the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20), it stands at the center of Paul's great definition of the gospel (1 Cor. 15:3-5), and it is a truth heralded with flaming power at Pentecost (Acts 2:36). With respect to evangelism, G. Campbell Morgan says, "To preach the living lordship of Christ is to create the necessity for His cross.""(53)

• "But, as has been stressed in this study, repentance has nothing to do with what we have done. Rather, it is our coming undone in respect to all human righteousness, followed by going outside ourselves in faith to Christ alone for salvation." (53)

• "There is no greater stumbling block to the salvation of pseudo-Christians than the insistence of believing relatives and friends that the unsaved loved one is already in Christ." (56)

• "I do not mean to imply for a moment that every believer's religious life should be modeled along the same lines. Christian piety can take many different forms. But whenever there is genuine life, this life will produce the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:2)." (56)

• "It is the nature of the authentic Christian to respond with repentance and deeds of righteousness when corrected by the Word." (57)

• "If people are really carnally minded, they are lost and yet in their sins." (57)

• "It is exceedingly important that we do not allow anything to blur the radical difference between the old and the new creation. To do so is to obscure the glory of the Christian hope and the transforming power of grace. We must give all the energy of faith to preaching that Christ of God who gives a totally new life with fullness of spiritual being." (59)

VI. Repentance and God's Mercy

• "God has entered into history, and this gives people everywhere a powerful, unprecedented reason for repenting." (61)

• "What can be done for sinners like these? They are dominated by an iron self-assertion which prefers their own glory to the glory of God (John 5:39-47, 12:41-43). Even more, what can be done for us, since we all participate in that spirit of unbelief which sent the Lord of glory to the cross? The answer is the cross itself. We have all sinned against the law of God, and now this rebellion has come to climactic expression in our sinning against the ultimate gift of God. But the cross includes in it payment for this worst sin of all--the scorning of it." (64)

• "Unbelief is the supreme transgression of the world. and as your sin too, it is most dangerous to your spiritual life. Specifically, unbelief kills our love and feeds our pride." (65)

• "Jesus then teaches us that repentance for the worst of sins is freely given to believers on the basis of the greatest of gifts. Thus, it is not just the sight of my unbelief that makes me wish to repent, but my seeing the magnitude of the heavenly love." (66)

• "Repentance thus is the more negative side of conversion, the overturning of the idols and the turning to God; saving faith is the more positive side of conversion." (67)

VII. Repentance and Counseling

• "But to evade God's condemnation, people erect about themselves a protective wall of self-righteousness." (69)

• "No matter how hard people try, they cannot finally escape from this inner torment by moving rapidly through the outer physical spaces though this is a favorite device adopted by those who live in a self-energized speed culture." (70)

• "The mystery is that Christ's sacrifice includes in it payment for our despisal and indifference- and you repent of such a sin by trusting in Jesus blood for cleansing." (77)

• "It points up the danger which constantly faces both new believers and long-time Christians. It is the temptation to think of the first conversion as everything and to forget that repentance and faith include a continuing, radical reorientation of the life toward God. Hear what John Murray says: "Christ's blood is the laver of initial cleansing but it is also the fountain to which the believer must continuously repair. It is at the cross of Christ that repentance has its beginning; it is at the cross of Christ that it must continue to pour out its heart in the tears of confession and contrition." (77)

• "Our work is to teach and preach the gospel in a searching manner, to lay the basis for repentance by showing sinners how much they need the Lord of glory as Savior from their guilt and filth. It is a solemn fact that God has ordained that men and women be saved through preaching." (78)

• "Effective counseling is principally a carrying forward in private of specific applications of the preaching ministry in the church! The gospel message is announced boldly in a public context, then given added effectiveness by a one-to- one follow-up in dealing with particular idols which Christ wants removed from each of our lives." (79)

• "The gospel message is a mirror in which all repentant sinners behold the image of Christ and are being transformed from glory to glory through the power of the Spirit. Do not underestimate it. For the gospel enables those who are new creations to face their own sins squarely, confess them and forsake them. Do not underestimate it. For the gospel brings forgiveness to us through Christ's death." (82)

VIII. Repentance and Sharing Christ

• "Until we have experienced the breaking down of pride by the Holy Spirit, we do not understand what witnessing is all about." (83)

• "The awareness of great weakness paves the way for a thoroughgoing repentance that results in a filling with the Holy Spirit's power. Your conviction of sin is used by the Lord to bring you to claim the victory of grace in Him." (84)

• "These wiles of Satan are countered by honesty in prayer. Honest prayer unmasks your real need and puts you in the presence of a rich Christ who wants to meet you as you really are-"wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked" (Rev. 3:17). (85)

• "So in your confession to God you fight to name your sin-and to give your sin its right name. Then you hand it over to Christ by faith and taste the happiness of guilt forgiven (Ps. 32:1) and find the deliverance from hypocrisy which comes through honest confession (Ps. 32:2-5)."(85)

• "God loves you where you are, not where you have been pretending to be. There is a natural transition now to start loving other sinners where they are, not where they pretend to be- or where you think they should be." (86)

• "Humility and sincere love appeal in any age. But in ours these qualities become especially magnetic."(87)

• "As their repentance deepens they learn to see other people compassionately. They know that God broke through their own thick shell, and that all good in themselves originated with a sovereign invasion from without." (89)

• "You find witnessing power only by going to the throne of grace and coming to Christ to get yourself clean and under the blessing of God. From there you go forth to share what you have received firsthand from the Father. This is the beating heart of Christian witness. In evangelism everything depends upon a humble, self-forgetting boldness before God and humanity. Pray boldly and you will witness boldly (Eph. 6:18-20, 1 Thess. 1:5, Acts 4:29-31). Confess your sins freely before God, and you will have freedom to confess Christ before others." (90)

• "John Calvin says, "Fear hinders us from preaching Christ openly and fearlessly, while the absence of all restraint and disguise in confessing Christ is demanded from His ministers. The remedy for this timidity is to carry the sin directly to God in prayer until He fills the penitent heart with an ongoing love that refuses to be stopped by the resistance of sinners to the gospel." (91)

Epilogue

• "My hope and prayer is that God will continue to use this small book to teach the joy of repentance, humility and a life lived in service to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ." (98)

Notable Content

• Root-sins: pride, unbelief, lust. (15)

• Branch sins and Root sins. (33)

• Reasons for praying privately in coming to Christ: (82)

  1. First, prayer in private makes it more difficult for people to use the counselor as a priest and hopefully brings them to rely on Christ on Christ alone for salvation.

  2. Secondly, prayer alone brings the glory of Christ into sharp focus by moving the counselor out of the sinner's line of vision.

Notes on *Possessed by God*

Possessed by God: A New Testament Theology of Sanctification and Holiness, David Peterson (IVP, 1995)

Main Idea/Takeaway

Moral holiness in the Christian life, typically called "progressive sanctification" is better understood and practiced in the biblical terms of renewal, transformation, and growth — expressions of our definitive sanctification.

• "I will argue that definitive sanctification is a more important theme in the New Testament than has generally been acknowledged. Rightly understood, this doctrine is a key to holy living and a way through the impasse created by much previous debate. God calls us and enables us in Christ to live as those possessed by God and empowered by his Holy Spirit. This is the theme of the first three chapters of this book. The fourth chapter then examines New Testament exhortations to pursue holiness and considers the sense in which sanctification is a process of 'becoming' and 'acting'."(14)

• "The overall aim will be to hear afresh God's challenge to holiness, encouraged by the promises on which it is grounded and guided by the teaching with which it is associated." (16)

• "Sanctification is commonly regarded as a process of moral and 'spiritual transformation following conversion. In the New Testament, however, it primarily refers to God's way of taking possession of us in Christ, setting us apart to belong to him and to fulfil his purpose for us. Sanctification certainly has present and ongoing effects, but when the verb 'to sanctify' (Gk. hagiazein) and the noun 'sanctification' (Gk. hagiasmos) are used, the emphasis is regularly on the saving work of God in Christ, applied to believers through the ministry of the Holy Spirit." (27)

• "It would be more accurate to say that renewal and change flow from the regeneration and sanctification that God has already accomplished in our lives." (136)

• "Instead of speaking in terms of progressive sanctification, the New Testament more regularly employs the language of renewal, transformation and growth, to describe what God is doing with us here and now." (136)

• "In New Testament terms, we are to live as those who have been brought from death to life, discharged from the law to belong to Christ, led by the Spirit in a continuing struggle with the flesh. We are to live with a confidence in what God has already done for us and trust in him to continue his transforming work in us until we see him face to face." (137)

Interaction 

• The holiness of God, cf. Webster. (16)

• "But they are unable to effect such living" (21)

• On mission: "Mission is clearly the goal of sanctification in John17." (30)

• "Are you living by your assessment of your life or God's?" (49)

• "Believe the gospel. Embrace your identity in Christ. Live by God's assessment of your life." (49)

• "Think in terms not of measurable maturity, but trajectories of current devotion & practice. The "Pilgrim's Progress" allegory is again masterful." (91)

• cf. Beale article: relation between new creation and reconciliation in 2 Corinthians. (133)

• Present experience of glorification. (133)

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. The biblical starting-point

II. Sanctified in Christ

III. Sanctified by word and Spirit

IV. Pursuing holiness

V. Living between the cross and the resurrection

VI. Transformation, renewal, and growth

Appendix A: The meaning of hagiasmos in the New Testament

Appendix B: Sanctification and God's law

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction

• "Considering the passion for holiness expressed by writers and preachers in former generations, James Packer may be right to claim that 'holiness is a neglected priority throughout the modern church generally' and 'specifically a fading glory in today's evangelical world' (1984: 99)." (11)

• "Despite the significant work of Packer and others, there is room for a fresh look at the subject, with a particular focus on what the New Testament teaches about the way holiness is achieved and expressed."(12)

• "The assumption is generally made that sanctification is simply the process by which we become more and more holy." (13)

• "It obscures the distinctive meaning and value of the terminology in the New Testament, confusing sanctification with renewal and transformation." (13)

• "Sanctification is a state in which believers find themselves because of the work of Christ and the operation find themselves because of the work of Christ and the operation of his Spirit in their lives. They are called to remain in that state 'by living in correspondence to their given holiness' (614)." (14)

• "In sum, sanctification in the New Testament is seen as 'a one-time event and as a process, the believers being and becoming holy and acting correspondingly' (614)." (14)

I. The biblical starting- point

• "Even though the holiness of God cannot be adequately conveyed in vision or word, angelic beings declared that it could be encountered in our universe, which is like a vast temple dedicated to his use and the display of his glory. God's glory is his holiness revealed."(18)

• "The covenant relationship established by God contained at its heart the assurance that he would be their God and they would be his people (e.g. n. 17:7-8; Ex. 6:7). Consequently, he would be uniquely with them, to fulfil his purposes and bring blessing to them (e.g. Gn. 28:13-15; Ex. 3:7-8)." God's sanctifying presence would continue to mark them as a holy people and demand holiness of living as a response." (21)

• "Holiness cannot simply be acquired by human effort. It is a status or condition which God imparts to those whom he chooses to bring into a special relationship with himself through covenant and redemption. But it is a status that carries with it particular responsibilities."(23)

• "Just as Israel was made holy by God's saving activity in the time of Moses, and again in the restoration after the Babylonian Exile, so sanctification in the New Testament is an integral part of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. It is regularly portrayed as a once-for-all, definitive act and primarily has to do with the holy status or position of those who are 'in Christ'." (24)

• "Christians are sustained in holiness by the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit and the trust that he gives in the finished work of Christ. The essential work of the Spirit is to enable belief in the gospel, so that the blessings it offers may be continually enjoyed by God's people." (24)

• "Christians are called to live out the practical consequences of knowing God in Jesus Christ and of being consecrated by his saving work. Everything that is said about moral change and personal transformation in the New Testament is to be related to God's sanctifying initiative in Christ." (25)

• "...sanctification in Christ has to do with a profound re-orientation of values and behavior. Beginning with the 'heart' and reaching out to touch the life and witness of God's people at every level, God's word and God's Spirit bring change and transformation. In us and through us, something of God's holiness is revealed to the world." (25)

II. Sanctified in Christ

• "At the heart of the revelation that Jesus brings is the proclamation of God's redemptive achievement in the death of his Son. In his death, Jesus demonstrates the love which God has for the world and which he desires to see reflected in the life of his people. With the gospel message about Jesus and his work, God imparts his Spirit to us and binds us to himself in love. That same word keeps us in holiness and love, enabling us to share in his mission to the world." (33)

• "By his sovereign action in Christ, God sets apart and binds to himself those who have been purified from the defilement of sin. This objective, consecrating work of God has profound implications for the attitude and behavior of those who believe." (34)

• "Although Israel under the Old Covenant was able to draw near to God through the mediation of priests and the operation of the sacrificial system, the people were not 'perfected' in their approach to God (gf. 7:11; 10:1-2). However, with Jesus, 'a better hope' has been introduced by which we may draw near to him (7:19; 10:14)." (36)

• "This better hope is based on the 'better covenant', which has been enacted through 'better promises' (8:6). Here and now, we are 'qualified' to draw near to God with the certainty of sins forgiven and the confidence that we are in an eternally secure relationship with God (c/. 7:19; 9:9; 10:1-4, 14-23; 12:22-24). Our hope is also to meet God face-to-face, in the glory of his eternal kingdom (c/. 2:10; 4:9-10; 12:14, 22-24; 13:14), and so perfection in Hebrews involves ultimate glorification. Even so, what we have yet to experience is only an unfolding of what has already been achieved for us by Christ's sacrifice." (36)

• "The terminology of perfection is used to proclaim the fulfilment or consummation of men and women in a permanent, direct and personal relationship with God."(36)

• "Jesus' death brings about a cleansing from sin and a definitive consecration to God in the present. It also secures for us a share in the future that God has promised. We can draw near to God now with the directness and certainty that belong to the final state of his people (cf. 4:16; 10:19-22: 12:22-24). The perfecting of believers involves all of that. Our sanctification or consecration to God is only a part of the process of eschatological perfection, achieved through the perfecting of Christ (2:10; 5:9; 7:28)." (37)

• "The New Covenant promise of a renewed 'heart' is fulfilled when people are set free from the burden of unforgiven sins through trusting in the effectiveness of Christ's sacrifice (9:14; 10:22). They are thus renewed in faith and sincerity towards God. Only the cleansing provided by Christ can definitively free us to worship or serve the living God (9:14, Gk. latreuein) in a way that pleases him and truly honors him." (39)

• "Sanctification means being appropriated by God and dedicated to him by the saving work of his Son. The terminology is associated with the beginning of the Christian life and highlights the corporate dimension to sanctification in Paul's thinking. Sanctification has to do with the identity and status of those who are 'in Christ'. It also points to the lifestyle that is consistent with God's calling." (40)

• "The next clause, 'to those sanctified in Christ' (Ck. hegiasmenois en Christo), amplifies what it means to be God's church. The Corinthian Christians were a holy and distinct people in that corrupt and godless city. This was so because of God's initiative, drawing them into an exclusive relationship with himself.? What he had done for them "in Christ Jesus' had made them part of his eschatological community. Here the perfect passive participle "sanctified' should be understood as another way of speaking about their conversion and incorporation into Christ. It can hardly refer to their holiness of character or conduct, since Paul spends much time in this letter challenging their values and their behavior, calling them to holiness in an ethical sense. He does this on the basis that they are already sanctified in a relational sense, but need to express that sanctification in lifestyle." (41)

• "Jesus delivers us from the dominion of sin and death (redemption). By his righteousness he also makes it possible for us to be counted righteous by God (justification). At the same time, he establishes us in a distinct and exclusive relationship with the Holy One (sanctification). In the great Christological statement of 1 Corinthians 1:30, redemption, justification and sanctification are overlapping, but distinct theological concepts. This judgment is confirmed by the argument in 1 Corinthians 6:11." (44)

• "The Spirit's work is to empower the preaching of the gospel about Jesus, enabling those who hear to understand and believe (2:4-5; cf. 2:6-16). So the Spirit is the means whereby God in the present age 'effects the work of Christ in the believer's life' (Fee 1994: 219)." (47)

• "Sanctification is about being possessed by God and expressing that distinctive and exclusive relationship by the way we live." (48)

III. Sanctified by word and Spirit

• "Here it is important to note that everything in the Christian life, from beginning to end, is made possible by Jesus' self-giving in death (Eph. 5:25), previously described as 'a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God' (5:2). Only those who are sanctified by Christ now can be presented to him in glory then. Transformation is implied by the notion of glorification (cf. Rom. 8:29-30; 2 Cor. 3:18; 1 Jn. 3:2), the present work of the Spirit anticipating the ultimate transformation associated with the resurrection of our bodies." (54)

• "By faith in the gospel, we continue to be united with Christ, which is the heart of sanctification. By faith, we rely on his promises and grasp the power of his Spirit, so that we can resist sin and live for God. This theme will be particularly developed in chapter five. Faith is 'not only a receptive organ but also an operative power." (56)

• "When God sanctifies us as individuals, he establishes us as members of a holy fellowship, enabling us to play our part in maintaining and expressing the holiness of the church, in doctrine and lifestyle." (67)

IV. Pursuing holiness

• "So the challenge is to pursue practical expressions of the holiness or sanctification that is ours in Christ." (75)

• "Those who are cleansed and consecrated by Christ, and who look forward to sharing the perfection of holiness in his presence for ever, will pursue holiness as a lifestyle." (77)

• "Indeed, the Spirit he gives to Christians is the Spirit of holiness; and nothing unholy can be tolerated in the lives of individuals or communities where the Holy Spirit dwells (gf. 1 Cor. 3:16-17; 6:19-20; 2 Cor. 6:14-7:1)." (84)

• "The promises about God dwelling in the midst of his people, and welcoming as his sons and daughters those who separate themselves from everything unclean (6:16-18), are the motivation for a holy and separated life." (87)

• "From a positive point of view, the secret of a holy life is reflecting the character of God, knowing that his Spirit is at work amongst his people to make that separate and distinct lifestyle possible, and thus walking in the Spirit's ways. When they ignore these imperatives, believers dishonor the one who called them into an exclusive relationship with himself and compromise the holiness of the church as 'the temple of the living God' (6:16; cf. 1 Cor. 3:16-17; Heb. 12:15)." (88)

• "No Christian should doubt the need to give practical, everyday expression to the holiness that is our status and calling in Christ. Only those who trust in his sanctifying work on the cross, and take seriously the warning to 'pursue holiness', will 'see the Lord'." (91)

• "On the other hand, it is possible to be so zealous for 'progress' that one's attention shifts from God's grace to human effort. Moral growth and development will be God's gift to us at different stages of our lives, but spirituality must not be measured in terms of the rate of change. We are to go on exhibiting what we know of God's character and will, motivated by the certainty of his acceptance, cleansing and enabling in Christ, together with the promise of entire sanctification when we meet him, face to face. Progress may be seen as we exercise ourselves in that godly devotion which issues from a true knowledge of God in Jesus Christ." (91)

V. Living between the cross and the resurrection

• "When he moves to consider how justification by faith can lead to holiness of life, Calvin emphasizes the role of repentance. Repentance not only follows faith but is born of faith. Repentance means the true turning of our life to God, a turning that arises from a pure and honest fear of him' (Inst. 3.3.5). It consists in 'mortification of our flesh and of the old man' and in 'vivification of the Spirit'." (93)

• "In this chapter, I want to explore the idea that moral renewal proceeds from our union with Christ in his death and resurrection." (95)

• "Baptism into union with Christ is the way we identify with him in his epoch-changing death and draw on its benefits. Of course, conversion and water baptism are often separated in Christian experience. But Paul's point is that genuine initiation into Christ means trusting in his death as our death and his risen life as our life. In this respect, baptism is presented as our 'funeral rite' and a decisive break with the life and values of this present age." (97)

VI. Transformation, renewal, and growth

• "What makes me a new person in Christ is essentially faith in God and his promises. The Spirit's ongoing task is to renew my "mind' through the gospel and give me a new 'heart' to serve God in faith and obedience. Renewal of mind and heart transforms character and behavior because of the central place that the mind has in the orientation, attitudes and beliefs of the human personality. Renewal is not simply at the rational level, though this is foundational to the whole process of moral renewal and change that is effected by the Spirit. In the final analysis, renewal is the present experience of glorification through the Spirit, anticipating the glorification that will come with the resurrection of our bodies. It is being conformed to the likeness of Christ, who is himself the image of God."(133)

• "If we are definitively sanctified by the work of Christ and the gift of his Spirit, 'growth' in holiness will mean increasing and abounding in practical expressions of that status calling and commitment which is already ours by God's grace." (136)

Notable Content

• Definitive Sanctification explained. (14)

• "To what extent are we urged by Scripture to progress in holiness and in what manner? How should we pray for one another in this regard? How might we expect God to answer our prayers?" (71)

• Understanding Hebrews chapter 12. (75)

• Four senses in which Christians die to sin. (97)

• Brief comments on the concept of growth in the New Testament. (134)