Notes on *Plastic Donuts*

Plastic Donuts: Giving That Delights the Heart of the Father, Jeff Anderson (Multnomah, 2013)

Main Idea/Takeaway

• Discerning the kind of giving that delights the heart of the Father.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. The Plastic Donut

II. What is Acceptable?

III. Does the Amount Matter?

IV. Rule #1 There Are No Rules

V. A Two Percent Perspective

VI. Because You Can

VII. All the Difference

VIII. That Chair

Postscript

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction

• "When you start to see giving from God's perspective, the lights will come on." (3)

I. The Plastic Donut

• "I didn't see it coming, but at that moment it occurred to me: this is how our giving must feel from God's perspective. Our gifts to Him are like Plastic Donuts. God does not need our gifts or our money. But like a child's gift that moves her father, our gifts can really get God's attention." (8)

• "For years I had thought a lot about the receivers of my gifts: my church, my neighbor, my chosen charities.

  And I had studied the benefits that come to me as a giver. But I hadn't given much thought to my gift from God's viewpoint. Could it be that God desires a similar Plastic-Donut experience when I give to Him?" (9)

• "Remember, we all need personal clarity from Scripture when a question arises." (14)

• "...when your questions about giving can be answered with confidence, your connection with your heavenly Father will grow stronger." (16)

• "I saw more clearly why the joy of giving can seem so elusive. It's hard to experience it without looking up to the Father. Often, instead of looking up with my gift, I was looking down. Instead of pondering God's reaction to my giving, I was occupied with my own feelings on the subject. Instead of giving to the One unseen, I'd been giving to what I could see." (19)

II. What is Acceptable?

• "Still today, people are curious about Cain and Abel's gifts. For a story with so few details, theologians have many ideas. This much is clear: in the very begin-ning, God showed great interest in the gifts from His children." (23)

• "...perhaps the most significant lesson is this: Not all gifts are the same to Him. Not all gifts are acceptable." (24)

• "But when it comes to our pleasing God, bad doctrine often gets in the way. Some people view it as a performance or a way to appease God-or maybe to satisfy His demands. Of course, this is wrong. Others react negatively to the idea of pleasing God because of their past inability to please the people who are most important to them: a parent, a spouse, a boss, a friend. This is unfortunate. We may carry baggage from ruptured relationships on earth, but our relationship with God is different. It is pure! We can please God, and

  for the right reasons. Our greatest aim in life should be to please Him, whether we are on earth or in heaven (see2 Corinthians 5:9). The thought of pleasing God should be comforting to us, and our gifts are one tool that help us please Him."(26)

• "One of the most surprising to many of us is this: our gifts can delight the heart of the Father, bringing a smile to His face. These are acceptable gifts. (30)

III. Does the Amount Matter?

• "When it comes to our gifts, the amount matters. When the gift amount matters to us, it can matter to God too. When the amount doesn't matter to us, it doesn't matter to God." (35)

• "The question is, what are the amounts that matter to you? Do your gifts to God fit in this category? Are you as diligent in making careful provision for your gifts to God as you are in making other financial decisions?" (35)

• "In my discussions with Christians about giving, no opinion has been more frequently expressed than this one: "The amount doesn't really matter. It's all about the heart." I understand the good intentions behind this statement. The problem is, the message is wrong. Often we pull the heart card to avoid deeper questions about the amount we give."(37)

• "In fact, it's the amount that helps engage the heart."(38)

• "Much of my time and attention were spent considering other things to do with the 90 percent. I spent very little time thinking about the 10 percent I was giving away and zero time imagining a life of giving more than that."(40)

• "What I didn't realize was that my lifestyle had frozen my giving at the 10 percent level. When it came to my finances, my lifestyle had all the influence."(40)

• "Do your gifts engage your heart in worship? Do your gifts influence your lifestyle? Do your gift amounts matter to you? From God's perspective, the amount matters." (41)

IV. Rule #1 There Are No Rules

• "It's our next Acceptable Gift truth: When it comes to our gifts, we determine the amount." (44)

• "In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus provided instructions on giving, praying, and fasting. For each, He focused on the heart standard but did not provide an amount standard (see Matthew 6:1-18)."(45)

• "The bottom line is this: we determine the amount of our gifts. There is tremendous God-given freedom in that— and responsibility too."(60)

V. A Two Percent Perspective

• "If you've spent any time studying giving statistics, you likely know about the 2 percent. That's the percentage of income people give, on average, to charitable or religious causes. I agree it's a disappointing stat—not the measurement, but what it means. It falls well short of the 10 percent standard that has been held up as a minimum level for biblical giving."(64)

VI. Because You Can

• "God desires everyone to give according to their abilities. It's a simple plan."(74)

• "Even though she was poor, the widow had a benchmark for a superior gift-it was her ability."(77)

• "Instead of asking why give more, we began to ask why not? Giving decisions became easier."(82)

• "Tapping your true giving ability will require countercultural lifestyle choices-such as debt-free living or a reduction in your spending."(84)

• "When it comes to our gifts, we know the amount matters. And when selecting our gifts, we determine the amount, in order to delight our Father.

  In measuring whether our gift is the acceptable kind, God measures it according to our ability. He understands our ability and takes it into consideration, not as a celestial bill collector, but as a loving Father."(90)

VII. All the Difference

• "In the end, it is the condition of the giver's heart that makes the gift pleasing to God."(95)

• "On one hand, God doesn't want our gifts without our hearts being clear. On the other hand, we have seen that without gifts, our hearts cannot fully express love for God or others."(96)

• "Just because more than one thing is desired- and one is more highly sought than the other-does not mean that the other is not desired. Make sense? Without a heart that pleases God, our gifts have limited value. And without gifts that please God, our heart expression is limited."(96)

• "That means that a primary way we speak from our hearts is through our gifts."(97)

• "The gift helps your heart speak what it really feels. And the heart makes your gift count for what it's really worth. The gift and the heart—they work together."(98)

• "Look up. Give your heart and soul to God. Then sense His smile. Sense His pleasure in you. Feel His embrace."(104)

VIII. That Chair

• "So bring your gifts to Him. May they be pleasing and acceptable in His sight. And may your face light up as you imagine the joyful approval of your Father as He receives you in one arm...and your Plastic Donuts in the other."(108)

Notable Content

"The next time you give a gift, remember the Acceptable Gift truths:

• The amount matters.

• We determine the amount.

• We give according to ability.

• The heart makes the gift count."(108)

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 *Spurgeon on the Christian Life*

Spurgeon on the Christian Life: Alive in Christ (Theologians on the Christian Life), Michael Reeves, (Crossway, 2018)

Main Idea/Takeaway

• The legacy of Spurgeon's theology of the Christian life is Christ-centered joy rooted in the gospel of grace, and very much alive.

• "This is a book about Spurgeon's theology of the Christian life, and those were the concerns that lay at the heart of it. Spurgeon was unreservedly Christ-centered and Christ-shaped in his theology; and he was equally insistent on the vital necessity of the new birth. The Christian life is a new life in Christ, given by the Spirit and won by the blood of Jesus shed on the cross." (16)

• "Rooted in glory, and gravitating to glory: that, according to Spurgeon, is the nature of the Christian life." (180)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Charles Spurgeon

I. A Man Full of Life

Part II: Christ the Center

II. Christ and the Bible

III. Puritanism, Calvinism, and Christ

IV. Christ and Preaching

Part III. The New Birth

V. New Birth and Baptism

VI. Human Sin and God's Grace

VII. The Cross and New Birth

Part IV. The New Life

VIII. The Holy Spirit and Sanctification

IX. Prayer

X. The Pilgrim Army

XI. Suffering and Depression

XII. Final Glory 

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction

• "Spurgeon concretely lived out his belief that the Christian life is not a dull, ethereal existence on some higher, invisible plane. It is being more full, more human--brighter, more involved and more lively." (17)

• "Brethren, we should cultivate a clear style. When a man does not make me understand what he means, it is because he does not himself know what he means. ... If you look down into a well, if it be empty, it will appear to be very deep; but if there be water in it, you will see its brightness. I believe that many "deep" preachers are simply so because they are like dry wells with nothing whatever in them, except decaying leaves, a few stones, and perhaps a dead cat or two. If there be living water in your preaching, it may be very deep, but the light of the truth will give clearness to it." - CHS (19)

• "Some preachers seem to be afraid lest their sermons should be too rich in doctrine, and so injure the spiritual digestions of their hearers. The fear is superfluous. ... This is not a theological age, and therefore it rails at sound doctrinal teaching, on the principle that ignorance despises wisdom. The glorious giants of the Puritan age fed on something better than the whipped creams and pastries which are now so much in vogue." -CHS (20)

• "That combination of concerns, for theological depth with plainness of speech, made Spurgeon a preeminent pastorally minded theologian." -CHS (21)

Part I: Charles Spurgeon

I. A Man Full of Life

• "And while he surely struggled, it would be wildly misguided to think of Spurgeon as a fragile pushover. It would be far better to say that tenderness saved him: it kept his robustness of character from steamrolling those weaker than himself, and channeled it for their benefit." (27)

• "Spurgeon was an unmistakably and deliberately earnest man. With a deep concern for the glory of Christ and the fate of the lost, he believed that Christians should be able to say with our master, "Zeal for your house will consume me" (John 2:17; cf. Ps. 69:9)." (29)

• "But perhaps it is Spurgeon's cigar smoking that best reveals his sunny playfulness as well as his vivacious willingness to enjoy created things." (30)

• "Humor, he believed, is normally the fruit of something deeper. Sometimes it can come from no more than high spirits--and this, he admitted, was a temperamental challenge for him.

• We must-some of us especially must-conquer our tendency to levity. Agreat distinction exists between holy cheerfulness, which is a virtue, and that general levity, which is a vice. There is a levity which has not enough heart to laugh, but trifles with everything; it is flippant, hollow, unreal." (31)

• "Most essentially, though, Spurgeon's sunny manner was a manifestation of that happiness and cheer which is found in Christ, the light of the world. The "levity" he found in himself, and questioned, was inextricably related to his clear refusal to take himself-or any other sinner-too seriously." (32)

• "Rather like Jonathan Edwards, Spurgeon believed that it is right to "read" creation as a book full of testimony to the Creator and his ways." (34)

• "Christ is the logic and the light of the world; the gospel is the sum of all wisdom; the Scriptures are able to make us wise-and not just for salvation. Christians should therefore be wise and omnivorous people of comprehensive intellect." (36)

Part II: Christ the Center

II. Christ and the Bible

• "It is blessed to eat into the very soul of the Bible until, at last, you come to talk in Scriptural language, and your very style is fashioned upon Scripture models, and, what is better still, your spirit is flavoured with the words of the Lord. I would quote John Bunyan as an instance of what I mean. Read anything of his, and you will see that it is almost like reading the Bible itself. He... cannot give us his Pilgrim's Progress--that sweetest of all prose poems,-without continually making us feel and say, "Why, this man is a living Bible!" Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his soul is full of the Word of God." -CHS (39)

• "There is a peculiar majesty, a remarkable fulnes, a singular potency, a divine sweetness, in any word of God, which is not discoverable, nor anything like it, in the word of man. ... It is God's inspired teaching, infallible, and infinitely pure. We accept it as the very word of the living God, every jot and tittle of it, not so much because there are external evidences which go to show its authenticity, -a great many of us do not know anything about those evidences, and probably never shall,-but because we discern an inward evidence in the words themselves. They have come to us with a power that no other words ever had in them, and we cannot be argued out of our conviction of their superlative excellence and divine authority." -CHS (41)

• "The book is the revelation of Christ, who is the eternal Word and revelation of his Father; as such, it cannot be considered apart from Christ. The book is living and active because Christ is living and active. And just as Christ cannot be left out of Scripture, so Scripture cannot be apart from Christ." (42)

• "He treasured the Bible and held it to be entirely trustworthy because he treasured Christ and held him to be entirely trustworthy." (42)

• "The fact that scripture is the Word of Christ, that its purpose and mail theme is Christ, served as a strong melodic line throughout Spurgeon's thought and ministry." (43)

•  "In this way, Spurgeon saw theology much like astronomy: as the solar system makes sense only when the sun is central, so systems of theological thought are coherent only when Christ is central. Every doctrine must find its place and meaning in its proper relation to Christ." (44)

• "Christ himself is the truth we know, the object and reward of our faith, and the light that illumines every part of a true theological system." (44)

• "Jesus is the Truth. We believe in him,- not merely in his words. He himself is Doctor and Doctrine, Revealer and Revelation, the Illuminator and the Light of Men. He is exalted in every word of truth, because he is its sum and substance. He sits above the gospel, like a prince on his own throne. Doctrine is most precious when we see it distilling from his lips and embodied in his person. Sermons are valuable in proportion as they speak of him and point to him. A Christless gospel is no gospel and a Christless discourse is the cause of merriment to devlis." -CHS (45)

• "You cannot taste the sweetness of any doctrine till you have remembered Christ's connection with it." -CHS (45)

• "True Bible reading thus requires wakeful, attentive study and deep reflection on what is written." (47)

• "Scripture is the Spirit-breathed Word of God: we read it to know him, and we need his help." (47)

• "We are begotten by the word of God: it is the instrumental means of regeneration. Therefore love your Bibles. Keep close to your Bibles." (49)

III. Puritanism, Calvinism, and Christ

• "The rise of theological liberalism and Anglo-Catholicism in his day tended to make Calvinistic Puritanism look quaintly olde worlde and not a little pea-brained. More remarkable still was the unbigoted way in which he held this theology. Being so out of step with the theological climate of his day could easily have made him prickly and clannish, yet for all his unbending theological resolution, Spurgeon was strikingly broad-minded. " (51)

• "Yet even more than all the Bunyan references and imagery in Spurgeon's sermons and writings, Bunyan helped shape the very way Spurgeon spoke and wrote. Spurgeon instinctively disliked the flowery pretentiousness of Latinate words, but it was from Bunyan more than any other that Spurgeon learned the power and the simplicity of plain and homely Anglo-Saxon." (53)

• "He was emphatic that the purpose of his Pastors' College was to raise up pastors who would be thoroughly "Puritanic." (55)

• "In Puritan hands, deep and thoughtful theology was never allowed to become a game for the intelligentsia: it fueled worship and it built up the church. This concern he shared with them, for a heartfelt knowledge of the truth--beyond mere intellectual assent to the doctrines of the gospel-entirely shaped his vision for the Pastors' College." (55)

• "Calvinism means the placing of the eternal God at the head of all things. I look at everything through its relation to God's glory." -CHS (57)

• "Calvin's theology, in contrast, is the system of doctrine which most clearly magnifies Christ as a Savior and ascribes all the glory to God, and thus best captures the truth we shall sing for eternity as we gather around God's throne and praise him." (57)

• "God's glory being what it is, Spurgeon argued that Calvinistic theology is that in which Christians will find the greatest joy. Calvinism's deep view of sin and high view of God's grace are not harsh dogmas, except to those who would rather not think of themselves as sinners. They are liberating, joy-giving truths." (57)

• "For, to preach this "Calvinism" is really just to preach the gospel: justification by faith, without works; the sovereignty of God; the eternal, all-conquering love of God; the effective redemption of Christ; and the fact that God is powerful to save and keep to the uttermost." (57)

• "In part, Spurgeon's catholicity reflected a generosity of spirit and a humanity that preferred to treat people as people rather than theological specimens. He had a distaste for bigotry and what Philipp Melanchthon called the rabies theologorum that drives theologians, like dogs, to treat doctrines as bones to bark over." (62)

• "He wanted Christians to have more than a formal confession of faith, however orthodox and Christ-centered. For Spurgeon, healthy theology must involve an earnest and warm affection for the Christ who stands above and before all/Christ must be central, but he is truly central only when he is supremely adored." (63)

IV. Christ and Preaching

• "The special work of our ministry is to lay open Christ, to hold up the tapestry and unfold the mysteries of Christ." (66)

• "Since Christ's great and eternal purpose- and the very reason for his death-is to win for himself a bride, the preacher's purpose is, as it were, to woo for Christ. Preachers are called to make Christ known in all his goodness, beauty, and truth, that his people might yield themselves to him, delight in him, and be one with him." (66)

• "In the pulpit he sought not merely to inform his listeners about the Word of God but also to draw both believers and unbelievers to Christ. His aim was to see people transformed at the very deepest level, their affections and desires turning away from their naturally cherished sins to Christ." (66)

• "The object of all true preaching is the heart: we aim at divorcing the heart from sin, and wedding it to Christ. Our ministry has failed, and has not the divine seal set upon it, unless it makes men tremble, makes them sad, and then anon brings them to Christ, and causes them to rejoice." -CHS (66)

• "As well as distinguishing preaching from mere data-dumping, Spurgeon was clear that "to preach" is not the same thing as "to moralise." "Remember," he told his students, "you are not sent to whiten tombs, but to open them." The transformation he longed for in his listeners was not merely at the superficial behavioral level (though he wanted to see godly behavior), but also at the very core of their being. Through preaching the gospel, he wanted to see the spiritually dead come to new life in Christ, and the living to become more gloriously Christlike and alive." (67)

• "First, the preacher must clearly and faithfully preach Christ. He is "Scripture's great theme" and the bridegroom that the servants are sent forth to make known." (71)

• "'to preach Christ' involves preaching all the doctrines that set him forth. It is a stretching and not a limiting mandate for the preacher. Christ must, after all, be preached for who he is and what he has done in his entirety." (71)

• "Spurgeon was emphatic that keeping Christ central, prominent, and clear was the reason for the fruitfulness of his ministry." (74)

• "Next, if he is to be preached faithfully, the Christ who is the light and glory of God must be preached both clearlyand beautifully." (76)

• "Preachers who woo for Christ, aiming at divorcing hearts from sin and wedding them to Christ, must view themselves as standing in Christ's stead." (78) 

• "In order to serve as a faithful ambassador of Christ, and to dare to stand in his stead, the preacher must embody the new life Christ offers. He should both know and enjoy the truth he seeks to share if he is to share it successfully." (79)

• "Not only must the preacher generally embody new life in Christ; he must, more specifically, embody the actual text he expounds. Spurgeon himself always preached best, he found, if he managed to "bathe" or "soak" in his text, to let the text soak into him." (80)

• "All this advice was summed up in an address he gave at the Pastors' College in 1881, titled "Preach Christ in a Christly Manner." His students were all expecting him to urge them to preach Christ, and he did not disappoint: "Ministers of the gospel, let Christ be your subject, and let Christ be your model: find in him not only the truth you utter, but the way and life of your utterance." (80)

• "As we share the gospel with friends and neighbors, Spurgeon reminds us that it is Christ--in all the multifaceted glories of his person and work-who must be the focal point of our message and the treasure we offer. And as we do that, we will properly adorn our message as we share Christ's own zeal, Christ's own courageous meekness and simplicity, and Christ's own love for both God and neighbor." (82)

Part III. The New Birth

V. New Birth and Baptism

• "He remained a stalwart and passionate Baptist for the rest of his life. What matters for us here, though, is that his Baptistic convictions were not a mere matter of his having to choose a denominational alignment: they were an integral part of his theology of the Christian life." (88)

• "The particular doctrine adhered to by Baptists is that they acknowledge no authority unless it comes from the Word of God. ... If we could find infant baptism in the Word of God, we should adopt it. It would help us out of a great difficulty, for it would take away from us that reproach which is attached to us, -that we are odd, and do not as other people do. But we have looked well through the Bible, and cannot find it."-CHS (88)

• "Spurgeon's passionate commitment to baptistic theology was part and parcel of his commitment to the importance of the new birth and faith in Christ." (91)

• "Regeneration was something he always expected to see as he preached the gospel. A friend of his once came to him, depressed because for three months of ministry he had not seen a single conversion. Spurgeon slyly asked, "Do you expect the Lord to save souls every time you open your mouth?" Embarrassed, the man answered "Oh, no, sir!" "Then, Spurgeon replied, "that is just the reason why you have not had conversions: 'According to your faith be it unto you." (92)

VI. Human Sin and God's Grace

• "The desires of our hears, which should incline us to Christ, incline sinners away from him to anything else." (94)

• "I believe the Eternal might sooner forgive the sin of ascribing the creation of the heavens and the earth to an idol, than that of ascribing the works of grace to the efforts of the flesh, or to anyone but himself."-CHS (98)

• "While God uses his truth, his final object is not the head but the heart. Through his Word he enlightens minds in order that hearts might be healed and won to himself. Preachers, therefore, must avoid vacuousness in their preaching, and they must avoid heartless intellectualism. The object of all true preaching, after all, is the heart, and preaching has failed "unless it makes men tremble, makes them sad, and then anon brings them to Christ, and causes them to rejoice. Sermons are to be heard in thousands, and yet how little comes of them all, because the heart is not aimed at, or else the archers miss the mark." (98)

• The cross-that deepest revelation of the glory of God- is the great weapon that breaks down the heart's defenses. Where the good news of Christ crucified is passed over, preaching must lack the power of God to save sinners." (99)

• "The gift of a"new heart" means the radical transformation of our affections and desires. "The affections are the most powerful part of our nature, they to a great extent mould even the understanding itself, and if the heart be defiled all the mental faculties become disturbed in their balance. God, therefore, commences at the heart."- CHS (101)

• "Here again Spurgeon inserted a helpful pastoral lesson. We must not mistake natural tenderness for this "heart of flesh." Some people are born constitutionally sensitive, but that does not mean they are spiritually sensitive. It may well be that they are simply impressionable and can be influenced quickly for evil as well as good." (103)

• "Regeneration is a work of pure grace- and those the Lord regenerates, he will indwell." (103)

VII. The Cross and New Birth

• "In the end, all talk of the centrality of Christ would, for Spurgeon, be inaccurate if we separated Christ from his work and failed to mention his crucifixion." (105)

• "The cross is the pinnacle of Christ's work and the clearest window into his identity: it was the key and the plumb line for Spurgeon as he contemplated Christ and the new life he offers." (105)

• "The most educated must find their wisdom in the cross, or die fools." -CHS (106)

• "All good things lie within the compass of the cross, its outstretched arms overshadow the whole world of thought; from the east even unto the west it sheds a hallowed influence; meanwhile, its foot is planted deep in the eternal mysteries, and its top pierces all earth-born clouds, and rises to the throne of the Most High." -CHS (106)

• "The cross being so pivotal, Spurgeon made it the emblem of his Pastors' College, surrounding it with the motto Et Teneo Et Tenor, "I Hold and Am Held (fig. 2): "I hold" because Christ crucified is the saving and sanctifying truth we must hold out to all people; "I am held" because the blood of Christ is what attracts us to Christ and what holds us safe in Christ." (107)

• "Spurgeon taught that the minister's "great object of glorifying God" is mainly achieved through the preaching of "Christ and him crucified." There the true wisdom, power, holiness, goodness, love, and sovereignty of God are revealed in all their surprising beauty, winning the hearts of those who look to him." (116)

• "When the glory of God is displayed in the cross, we get to see all God's perfections. We see that God is not merely helpful to the weak but also long-suffering and infinitely merciful to great sinners. We see the riches of his grace, his sovereign power to save, his holy justice, and his love. And never does one attribute clash with another." (117)

• "At the heart of the cross, then, was a work of penal substitution, and Spurgeon would be both persistent and outspoken in teaching and defending this theme." (119)

• "Christs substitutionary sacrifice  is essential to the gospel and to faithful preaching, Spurgeon believed. It is the only message which allows-yes, and demands-us to put all our trust in Christ and none in ourselves for salvation. After all, if Christ is our perfect substitute-if our sin is imputed to him and his righteousness to us--then no merit of ours can be necessary. A penal substitutionary atonement means that we can accept by simple faith (and faith alone) what Christ has done for us."(120)

Part IV. The New Life

VIII. The Holy Spirit and Sanctification

• "Growth in the Christian life is not, therefore, something very different from the initial experience of conversion. It is, first and foremost, about turning to Christ in faith and love. It is, consequently, about increasing likeness to Christ." (126)

• "When considering the work of the spirit in believers, Spurgeon liked to speak of how the Spirit of life makes lively people. As the Son of God is dynamically and fully alive in the Spirit, so he makes the children of God spiritually active and energetic. This is what life means. The idea of a passive Christian, content in sin, content not to know God better, was simply anathema to this understanding of the Spirit." (130)

• "In order to make us holy, the spirit animates us to a particular sort of love above all: that love which finds its joy in God. Spurgeon wrote and preached a good deal on joy." (135)

• "What is the gospel?" he once asked. "Glad tidings of great joy." And why? For the gospel reveals a happy God. The happiness of God was a theme Spurgeon returned to again and again. He held that it "enters into the essential idea of God that he is superlatively blessed. We cannot conceive of a God who should be infinitely miserable." Being infinitely full of happiness, God is a God who delights to share his happiness, and who created us for that very reason. "He is the happy God; ineffable bliss is the atmosphere in which he lives, and he would have his people to be happy... for a joyous God desires a joyous people." (136-137)

• "The Christian life, then, is one of entering into what Spurgeon called"the noblest and truest immortality," whereby we "live as God liveth, in peace and joy, and happiness."'S By rejoicing in the Lord, we "commence our heaven here below." (137)

• "Above all, though-above all the blessings of salvation and adoption--it is God in himself who is the great object of our joy. Thus when our hearts or circumstances leave us feeling that we cannot rejoice in anything else, we can still rejoice, for we rejoice in One who is unchangeably joy-giving." (137)

• "Man cannot please God without bringing to himself a great amount of happiness."- CHS (138)

• "True Christlikeness involves desiring to enjoy God ever more." (138)

• "As Spurgeon saw it, joy in God is part of the very fiber of Christian vitality, and thus he would connect it to every other aspect of holiness." (139)

• "Since we are made to be happy in Christ, joy is an essential part of human health. When a person is full of joy, "it shines out of his eyes, it sparkles in his countenance.. it quickens the flowing of the blood in the veins; it is a healthy thing in all respects." (139)

• "Joy in the Lord has the power to strengthen believers against temptation, for when we find our happiness and satisfaction in him, we will not seek it elsewhere. Joy has a medicinal power to cure the ills that come from grumbling. It therefore has the ability to drive away quarreling and promote peace. It is the cure for fretfulness and anxiety. And it is a contagious good, as cheer in one quickens cheerfulness in others, so spreading its own benefits." (140)

• "Christians must, then, fight for joy, and fight for that intimacy with God that fosters joy." (140)

• "So take care that you rejoice in the Lord when you have other things to rejoice in. When he loads your table with good things, and your cup is overflowing with blessings, rejoice in him more than in them."- CHS (140)

• "The spirit's enlightening work over the years that follow is thus quite bittersweet, for enlightening means not only knowing God better but also knowing self better. The Spirit enables us to see ever deeper into our own darkness, the depths of which would simply overwhelm the young believer. Mature Christians therefore feel themselves to be greater sinners than do young Christians. It is not that they are; rather, the Spirit has made them more sensitive to sin and more averse to it. Those sins we once ignored as petty and worth no attention become to us a source of ever-deeper pain." (141)

• "I do not know, beloved, when I am more perfectly happy than when I am weeping for sin at the foot of the cross." -CHS (142)

IX. Prayer

• "Prayer is communion with God, which is the very nature of eternal life. It is faith in action. It is a taste on earth of the everlasting life of praise Christians will enjoy before the throne of heaven." (144)

• "The habit of private prayer, and the constant practice of heart fellowship with the Most High, are the surest indicators of the work of the Holy Spirit upon the heart." (144)

• "Prayer must not only be the living breath of the new life: it must also be the breath of any faithful ministry. Because of what prayer is, no amount of talent or education--wonderful gifts though they may be to the church-can substitute for it." (146)

• "As a rule, we ministers ought never to be many minutes without actually lifting up our hearts in prayer. Some of us could honestly say that we are seldom a quarter of an hour without speaking to God, and that not as a duty but as an instinct, a habit of the new nature for which we claim no more credit than a babe does for crying after its mother."-CHS (147)

• "To come before God as our Father means that we can pray with boldness, assurance, and even joyful familiarity. It means we are not approaching a stranger or an enemy." (151)

• "It is when we do not feel fit to pray that we most need it. In such times we must pray for prayer--or, as Spurgeon liked to put it, "pray till we pray." And in those times when we do not feel fit for prayer, we must strike quickly, for that is the Devil's hour." (152)

•  "If you cannot speak, cry; if you cannot cry, groan; and if you cannot even groan to God, "let thy prayer be at least a breathing, a vital, sincere desire, the outpouring of thine inner life in the simplest and weakest form, and God will accept it. In a word, when you cannot pray as you would, take care to pray as you can."- CHS (153)

X. The Pilgrim Army

• "Two of Spurgeon is favorite books were by john Bunyan: The Pilgrims Progress and The Holy War; and together they represent two key aspects of the Christian life as Spurgeon saw it." (155)

• "Machismo is a distorted, cartoonish caricature of the human flourishing of manhood Spurgeon promoted. What he longed to see was more strength exercised (and restrained) in the name of love for Christ. In other words, he wanted believers to have a backbone to their faith." (158)

• "The Christian life is one of sharing the self giving life of God. l must then be a proactively generous life committed to blessing others. And it is then that we experience more richly God's own joy." (160)

• "Faithful activism for Christ is a manifestation of affections that have been reordered to share Christ's passions. Thus Spurgeon held that earnest zeal for the glory of God is the most essential quality in a Christian minister." (162)

• "Only with such heartfelt love for God can the Christian truly share the life of Christ, who was consumed by zeal for God's house John 2:17). Only that way can they be faithful and resolute for him.'s Only that way can they be most truly joyous and alive, for to "live entirely for the Lord is to live indeed, all else is mere existing." (162)

XI. Suffering and Depression

• "Knowing by most painful experience what deep depression of split means, being visited therewith at seasons by no means few or far between, I thought it might be consolatory to some of my brethren if gave my thoughts thereon, that younger men might not fancy that some strange thing had happened to them when they became for a season possessed by melancholy; and that sadder men might know that one upon whom the sun has shone right joyously did not always walk in the light." -CHS (164)

• "The gods of other religions might give ease to the good and health to the worthy. Not so in Christianity, where "goodness" is Christ himself, and conformity to him. God will not therefore simply reward believers with ease in this life, for that would make ease, rather than Christ, the greater prize. Suffering is therefore a "covenant mark," a proof that God is our Father and therefore cares enough about us to do everything necessary to mold and clip us into the likeness of his happily holy son." (165)

• "When a pastor patiently endures difficulty and affliction, and keeps rejoicing in God, it powerfully commends the gospel as glad tidings of great joy. The pastor-or, indeed, any Christian who ministers to another--can prove the comfort that is to be found in God in such times. God therefore often leads his under-shepherds through trials, "not so much for their own benefit as for the sake of those to whom they may afterwards minister." (168)

• "Christian ministers should therefore expect a special degree of suffering to be given to them as a way of forming them for Christlike, compassionate ministry." (169)

• "Just now, when anguish fills the heart, and the spirits are bruised with sore pain and travail, it is not the best season for forming a candid judgment of our own condition, or of anything else; let the judging faculty lie by, and let us with tears of loving confession throw ourselves upon our Father's bosom, and looking up into his face believe that he loves us with all his infinite heart." (172)

• "In suffering then, it is not only the case that we get to draw neater to Christ, becoming more like him and leaning more fully on him. In such times Christ draws near to us to walk with his people in the furnace. And not only to walk with us, but to bear us through." (174)

XII. Final Glory 

• "Spurgeon clearly saw that the Christian hope is to enjoy both communion with God and communion with the people of God." (176)

• "Heaven is heavenly precisely because it is the place of communion with Christ, where his glory is enjoyed. And hell is hellish because it is the place of cast-out Christlessness." (177)

• "Spurgeon's theology of the Christian life was one compassed about on all sides by the glory of God. We have life and new life because of the glory of God, and the glory of God is what we live, hope, and aim for. It is our whence, our whither, our where, and our why?" (179)

• "God's greatest glory is that he is good. The brightest gem in the crown of God is his goodness." (179)

• "The glory of the living God is a self giving, fertile glory. He rejoices to give and share his eternal happiness and life, and he has proved this on the cross." (179)

• "The outgoing, self-giving nature of God's glory is the reason for all created life, and it is the reason we have a gospel of grace. But there is a gracious undertow to God's expansive glory: as God in his glory gives out, so in that same glory he draws his creation in to enjoy his life-giving presence." (180)

• "The Christian life blooms and flourishes in the light of God's glory, where God both gives out and draws in. Having received new life in Christ from God's glorious grace, we find ourselves drawn in to enjoy him and to long for more of him." (180)

Notable Content

• How to Read the Bible: (46-48)

  1. The reader must understand what is written.

  2. The reader must seek out Scripture's meaning and intent. 

  3. Scripture reading is profitable.

• Advice for Preachers: (71-82)

  1. Preach Christ 

  2. Preach Clearly and Beautifully

  3. Stand in Christ's Stead

  4. Seek to Embody the Text

  5. Preach Christ in a Christly Manner

• Two essential reasons for opposing infant baptism: (90-91)

  1. First, to give even the impression that dropping water on a head can save a soul undermines entirely the gospel's call for people to be born again.

  2. Second, infant baptism not only conceals our need to be born again; it also draws people to trust in something other than Christ.

• "Third Nature" see footnote 34. (101)

• Sermons on joy. (135)

Notes on *The Care of Souls*

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

Main Idea/Takeaway

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interaction 

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

• Give them Jesus. (17)

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

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

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

Table of Contents

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

II. What is a Pastor? The Classical Model

III. The Cure of Souls: Attentive Diagnosis

IV. The Cure of Souls: Intentional Treatment

V. Sheep-Dogging and Shepherding: The Noble Task

VI. Guilt and Shame

VII. Holiness and the Cure of Souls

VIII. Drawing Near to God: Proximity and Holiness

IX. Invisible PowersL Spiritual Warfare

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

XI. The Shepherding of Shepherds

XII. Always Be Steady: Equilibrium in Ministry

Conclusion: Joy in Office

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Preface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. What is a Pastor? The Classical Model

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

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

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

III. The Cure of Souls: Attentive Diagnosis

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

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

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

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

IV. The Cure of Souls: Intentional Treatment

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

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

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

V. Sheep-Dogging and Shepherding: The Noble Task

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

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

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

VI. Guilt and Shame

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

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

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

VII. Holiness and the Cure of Souls

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

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

VIII. Drawing Near to God: Proximity and Holiness

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

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

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

IX. Invisible PowersL Spiritual Warfare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI. The Shepherding of Shepherds

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

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

XII. Always Be Steady: Equilibrium in Ministry

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

Conclusion: Joy in Office

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

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

Notable Content

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

  1. Faith

  2. Providence

  3. Holiness

  4. Repentance

• How to Bless:

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

Notes on *Hearers and Doers*

Hearers and Doers: A Pastor's Guide to Making Disciples Through Scripture and Doctrine, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, (Lexham Press, 2019)

Main Idea/Takeaway

Pastors must be theologically rooted to help church members recover the primacy of Scripture in their discipleship.

• "Hearers & Doers is intended to help pastors fulfill their Great Commission to make disciples, with emphasis on the importance of teaching disciples to read the Scriptures." (Preface xi)

• "My hope is that the present book will help pastors recover Calvin's vision for theology as a help to reading the Bible in ways that enliven and encourage disciples to walk its way of wisdom." (Preface xxii)

• "To make disciples is to teach people how to become biblically literate so they can be effective inhabitants and representatives of the city of God, for the purpose of gospel citizenship." (71)

• "Accordingly, this book is a guide for hearing and reading the Bible rightly, as well as a training manual for doing the Bible rightly. The goal is to train disciples to walk around in the strange new world of the Bible even as they live in the familiar old world of the present. It is a pastor's guide for training hearers and doers, faithful followers of Jesus Christ and faithful interpreters of the Word that directs us in his Way." (71)

• "I want to examine the significance of sola Scriptura in making disciples by stressing its role in fostering the Christocentric social imaginary that makes the church a creature of the word." (99)

• "A pastor does many things, but I have argued that most of these things are forms of ministering God's word: either by speaking (preaching, teaching, counseling, praying) or enacting it (celebrating the Lord's Supper, visitation). The particular focus of the present work has been on the pastor as disciple-maker, or what I have described elsewhere as "public theologian"- one who does theology with and for people." (241)

Interaction

• Social imaginary = deep assumptions. (8)

• The negative task of theology. (9)

• What other words are shaping our people? (50)

• Pastors minister by helping people make connections in three key areas. (117)

• What is a pastor-theologian? (123)

• If we don't mature immature Christians into real disciples, who will? The church is where this must happen. This goes for all 'immature Christians' that make up a congregation. The consumers, the feminists, etc. Where do they go to become disciples? It must be the church. And so the stronger brothers must bear with the failings of the weak. (Romans 15:1)." (125)

• Preach the Bible; baptism and Lord's Supper; and people are not part of the church who shouldn't be. (127)

• This is our consumer culture, which is not 1 Timothy 6:8. (146)

• Credo-Baptism see p.218. (150)

• Lord's Supper see p.221. (151)

• "The church is most itself at Table." (221)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: Warming Up: Why Discipleship Matters

I. The Role of Theology in Making Disciples

II. Whose Fitness? Which Body Image?

III. From Hearing to Doing

IV. Doctrine for Discipleship

Part Two: Working Out: How Discipleship Happens

V. Creatures of the Word

VI. Company of the Gospel

VII. Communion of Saints

VIII. Children of God

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction:

• "In short: what it means to be biblical is inextricably related to what it means to be Jesus; disciples, and what form this discipleship should take in the twenty-first century." (xviii)

• "Doctrine, like Scripture, teaches disciples who they are "in Christ." Disciples have to understand, and remember, whose Way they belong to." (xviii)

• "Why should pastors study theology? So that they can better know whom they worship, and learn how to form others into true worshipers who know how to worship, and to walk, in spirit and truth (John 4:22-24)." (xxi)

• "Theology is about learning how to live out Christ's life in us (Gal 2:20), a life that includes cruciform wisdom (1 Cor 2:2) and resurrection power (Phil 3:10)." (xxiii)

• "The aim of evangelism is to make converts, people who believe the gospel, repent of their former way of life, a bonfire of the vanities, and face a new direction- Christward." (xxiv)

• "Making disciples involves more (but not less) than informing minds or forming habits. It also involves transforming imaginations, that is, that primary ways they see, think about, and experience life." (xxv)

• "The pastor must be a theologian: someone who can relate life in general, and the lives of his congregation, to what Scripture shows us the Father doing in Christ through the Spirit to renew creation." (xxvii)

Part One

Warming Up: Why Discipleship Matters

I. The Role of Theology in Making Disciples

• "There is probably no more damaging picture distorting our present-day lives, and our understanding of the God of the gospel, than "love." Love is often depicted as a desire to be fulfilled (romanticism) or as accepting people for who they are (inclusivism) or as loyalty to one's own people group (tribalism)." (7)

• " A social imaginary is the picture that frames our everyday beliefs and practices, in particular the "ways people imagine their social existence." The social imaginary is that nest of background assumptions, often implicit, that lead people to feel things as right or wrong, correct or incorrect." (8)

• "The doctrines we hold be they philosophical, political, or theological, feel right or wrong, plausible or implausible, based largely on how well they accord with the prevailing social imaginary or world picture. What I have called above the "negative task" of theology is to critically reflect on the way in which the church embodies the prevailing social imaginaries of the day rather than the biblical imaginary- the true story of the Triune God is doing in the world." (10)

II. Whose Fitness? Which Body Image?

• "Theology helps the church make disciples by exposing the lie- the false social imaginaries that often hold even church members captive (the negative, critical task) - and by redirecting them to the way, truth, and life of Jesus Christ (the positive, indicative task)." (14)

• "Food cults arguably replace what religion once did by prescribing... food rules and rituals. Like religion, they provide meaning in confusing situations, giving us moral guidelines and comfort." (27)

• "Pastors, too, ought to be concerned with the diet of their congregation, particularly if we stretch the term to include what kind of reading and entertainment church members imbibe on a regular basis."(42)

III. From Hearing to Doing

• "Discipleship is about becoming who we are in Christ, and this is entirely a work of God: "Therefore, is anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" (2 Cor 5:17)." (44)

• "Discipleship is essentially a matter of hearing (authority), believing (trust), and doing the truth (freedom) that is in Jesus Christ." (50)

• "As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: in discipleship, "Jesus is the only content." Disciples do the truth, then, by following his way and living out his life: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20)." (52)

• "To be a disciple is to hear, do, and adore what we see there, in the mirror of Scripture: the lordship of Jesus Christ." (53)

• "True disciples are awake and alert to what is going on in the world, to what is really real, namely, the "real presence" of Jesus Christ. The true story of the world, narrated in Scripture, concerns God's presence and activity." (54)

• "We agree that the imagination is a key factor in making disciples. Yet we become disciples not simply by participating in Christian liturgical practices but by participating in- living into and acting out- Scripture's canonical practices and, yes, Christian doctrine (see 1 Tim 4:16)." (56)

• "To walk in the truth is to live in accordance with the truth of the gospel, that it, the truth of the new reality that has come into being in and through Christ's person and work." (59)

• "Christian discipleship is companionship with Christ. The Christian Way is that of the long-distance walker, a long obedience in the same direction, where day in and day out, with each step we take, we choose to live in a way that follows Jesus and corresponds to the truth- our new life in him. Making disciples is a step-by-step process of helping men and women to walk the Way of Jesus Christ." (60)

IV. Doctrine for Discipleship

• "Discipleship involves waking up to the realization that there is a choice, and we must stay awake to the lordship of Jesus Christ long enough to make the right one: to obey, and thereby to exercise, like Jesus, genuine freedom." (78)

• "Feeding on God's word involves more than tasting or taking a bite; it means making a meal of it, digesting it. Eugene Peterson calls Christians to absorb and imbibe the Bible so that it seeps into all our pores." (79)

• "Reading the Bible theologically, as teaching by God, of God, and leading to God, is our best hope for breaking free of the pictures that hold us captive: consumerism, humanism, transhumanism, nihilism, existentialism, moralism, scientism, and so on- idols all, of heart and mind. Reading Scripture theologically means reading it together, in the church, in ways that lead to its readers' moral and spiritual, and sapiential formation." (85)

Part Two

Working Out: How Discipleship Happens

V. Creatures of the Word

• "Pastors must do everything they can to ensure that Scripture alone, and not some other story, serves as their congregation's essential social imaginary." (94)

• "One such insight is that the church must always be "reforming" its thought and life in accordance with the Scriptures. In particular, the church must always be reforming in order to imagine the world that the Bible imagines." (95)

• "The best way to take captive the imagination of Christians in any age is through the church's proclamation of the gospel in word and deed: in sermon, sacrament and shapes of everyday living." (103)

• "The evangelical imagination alone opens up the real possibility of living along the grain of reality: according to what is really the case "in Christ." (110)

• "As Ephraim Radner says, preaching "is a way of putting us back where we belong: into the text itself...where God's word, in all his creative omnipotence, does its work of self-giving and conformation." (115)

• "Pastors minister this needed understanding by helping people make connections in three areas: between the parts of the Bible and the overarching story; between the Bible and the world in which they live; and between who they are at the moment and who God calls them to be in Christ." (117)

• "The sermon is not a secondhand description of what is happening in a historical galaxy far, far, away. No, gospel preaching proclaims the true story of the world, acknowledging that all things are "from him and through him and to him" (Rom. 11:36). The sermon is the heavy artillery in the pastor-theologian's arsenal, and the best frontal assault on imaginations held captive by other stories promising other ways to the good life." (118)

• "Scripture alone is the ultimate story from which disciples must take their existential bearings." (119)

• "Pastors cannot know everything about everything, but they should be able to know one big thing about everything: whether or not it fosters life in Christ." (121)

• "We read the Bible in order to discern the Way of truth and life that leads to fellowship with God and human flourishing from ways of falsehood and illusion that lead only to the dead end of idolatry and human frustration." (122)

• "The pastor-theologian is a special kind of generalist a generalist who "specializes" in relating all things to the gospel of Jesus Christ in order to make disciples, especially by disciplining their imaginations to conform to the unified biblical narrative with Christ at its center." (123)

• "It takes an imagination shaped by the Bible to see one's congregation as a living temple, with each member a living stone. (1 Peter 2:5)" (124)

• "It takes a biblically formed eschatological imagination to look at a sinner and see a saint." (124)

VI. Company of the Gospel

• "The church is the biblically mandated place to make disciples." (125)

• "The Reformers also wrestled with the problem of how to recognize the tru church, and developed three criteria: the right preaching of the word, the right administration of the sacraments, and the proper exercise of discipline." (127)

• "What pastors have to say that no one else can say is not simply that there is a God bu that God has acted. The gospel is a report of something that has been done. We have news- breaking news that the kingdom of God has broken into our world in the person and work of Jesus Christ. God has acted (creating news to report) and God has spoken (the news is reliable because those who reported it were inspired by God). (129)

• "Christians today are living between the first and second comings of Jesus, in the closing scenes of Act IV, poised between memory and hope." (130)

• "Doctrine does not add content to Scripture, but it does add understanding. Doctrine develops only because the church's understanding of the biblical story and its implications has developed, just as Jesus promised it would: "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth." (John 16:13)" (133)

• "So how do we learn to get real? 'By reading Scripture theologically', that is, with the help of doctrine's ministry of understanding, and with a view to participating in the story of Scripture tells, the ongoing drama of redemption." (144)

• "Each part of the church's worship service- spoken or sung word, bath, table, prayer- focuses on some aspect of Jesus' story. Taken together, then, the liturgy is the church's spoken and enacted interpretation of the reality attested in and by Scripture. The liturgy is therefore theodramatic. It is all about rehearsing what the Triune God has done, is doing, and will do to renew creation and form a holy nation to be his treasured possession. Accordingly, the liturgy is a prime training ground for making disciples fit for theodramatic purpose." (145)

• "Everything in which we habitually participate leaves a little mark on our soul, forms our spirits, and trains our loves." (146)

• "Much of the mainstream culture in the modern and postmodern West contributes to the formation of individualist consumers who believe that certain things or experiences will complete their identity and satisfy their desire for happiness." (146)

• "Everything begins with disciples; ability to inhabit the biblical story and thus let Scripture serve as their primary imaginary." (153)

• "The point of liturgical performance is not to give disciples lines but rather to help shape their understanding of the story of Jesus of which they are a continuing part, and to prepare them to be the kind of people who want and are able to continue acting out new scenes of the same drama." (154)

• "What I am calling liturgical formation is the process of helping disciples enter into the drama to the point of becoming story-dwellers, people whose imagination is fixed on the reality of what God is doing in Christ through the Spirit to renew humanity and all creation." (160)

VII. Communion of Saints

• "sola Scriptura means that Scripture alone, as God's own set-apart discourse, is the only wholly reliable, sufficient, and final authority for the church's life and thought (including imagination). (176)

• "Pastors need to help disciples discern which doctrines are essential, requiring unity, and which are nonessential, requiring liberty (and charity)."(197)

• "Mere Protestant Christianity uses the resources of the solas and the priesthood of all believers to express the unity-in-denominational-diversity that local churches have in Christ." (201)

• "The local church, a people with canon sense and catholic sensibility, is the true end of the Protestant Reformation." (202)

VIII. Children of God

• "Christlikeness is the goal of discipleship. It is not only a way of walking but a state of being. To be more precise, it is the state of being-in, and abiding with, Christ." (204)

• "Christ is the image of God and disciples are to be images of Christ." (204)

• "The sobering truth is that much of what is going through our heads is not the story of Jesus but some other story." (209)

• "Pastors need to wake up congregations to the cultural forces that are forming their spirits, and perhaps clouding their vision." (211)

• "Learning Christ is a matter of following- or we could say practicing- Christ. It is by reading God's word, illuminated by the Spirit, that disciples learn to think rightly, see rightly, judge rightly, and act rightly, that is, in a Christlike manner." (216)

• "Wisdom means knowing what to do in particular situations in order to glorify God and follow Jesus in ways that befit faithful disciples. In a word, theological wisdom means knowing how to improvise the mind of Christ at all times, everywhere, and to everyone." (217)

• "To be in Christ is to be in the process of being restored to true humanity, a process that requires our active involvement. To put on Christ means to act out his life in us." (220)

• "The church is most itself at Table, for it is in partaking Christ's body that the church becomes Christ's body: one. In all its activities, especially the Lord's Supper, a local church in its corporate life "puts on" the spectacle of reconciliation in Christ and not only acts out but also becomes a parable of the kingdom of God." (221)

• "To take, read, and preach the Bible in the church, with an ear for the word of God to the people of God, is to read it as testimony to Christ, his person and work, his suffering and glory." (225)

• "This is our ultimate calling, our highest privilege and responsibility: to live into our adoption as sons and daughters of the Father. This is our destiny (and our predestination, Eph 1:5), to be adopted as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ." (234)

Notable Content

• "If you want to know what fuels the present-day social imaginary, follow the money: the GWI estimates that global wellness fuels $3.7 trillion economy, more than three times larger than the global pharmaceutical industry (beauty and anti-aging programs and products alone amounted to almost $1 trillion)." (18)

• See Atul Gawande's, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End , for a well articulated critique of the effects of secularization and medicalization on our concept of what it is to be well. (23)

• See Food Cults: How Fads, Dogma, and Doctrine Influence Diet (27)

• See (72-75) for seven initial theses on reading the Bible theologically.

• The Four Principles of the Protestant Reformation:(96-97)

  1. The material principle: justification by faith (sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus)

  2. The formal principle: "according to the Scriptures" (sola Scriptura)

  3. The dynamic principle: the Spirit who ministers, illumines, enlivens, and unites.

  4. The final principle: a citizenship of the gospel.

• "Scripture alone ought to rule our thinking about what a pastor is and does." See (114-116) for three metaphors that pastors would do well to allow to reshape their vocational imaginations.

• Five-Act Play: World History as a Drama of Redemption

Act I: creation and its subsequent corruption

Act II: beginning from Genesis 12 and running through the rest of the OT

Act III: Jesus: God's definitive saving Word

Act IV: begins with the risen Christ sending his Spirit to create the church

Act V: last judgment and the consummation of all things

• cf. John 13. Case for Community Groups. (139)

• Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Case for Community Groups. (140)

• Five Premises of sola Scriptura: (172-173)

  1. The Bible is the word of God written in human words inspired by the Holy Spirit.

  2. God both authors and authorizes the Bible.

  3. God's word is God's discourse: something God says about something to someone in some way.

  4. Different types of discourse exercise authority in different ways over different domains.

  5. All divinely authored discourse serves the same ultimate end.

• Prioritizing public Bible reading. (198)