Saturday, October 29, 2011

fear of the Lord


Where "the Gospel" is shared, it comes across something like this: "God accepts you just as you are. God has unconditional love for you." that is not biblical Gospel, however. the Gospel is better than unconditional love. the Gospel says, "God accepts you just as Christ is. God has 'contraconditional' love for you." Christ bears the curse you deserve. Christ is fully pleasing to the Father and gives you His own perfect goodness. Christ reigns in power, making you the Father's child and coming close to you to begin to change what is unacceptable to God about you. God never accepts me "as I am." He accepts me "as I am in Jesus Christ."The center of gravity is different. The true Gospel does not allow God's love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul's lust for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people- what the Bible calls "fear of the Lord" and "faith"- to look outside themselves.

Jesus says to take up our cross daily, dying to the false gods we fabricate, and learning to walk in fellowship with Him who is full of grace to help us. Receptivity to God's love- "The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want"- is the absolutely necessary prerequisite for any sort of active obedience to God.

Let the Kingdom be always before you; and believe steadfastly concerning things that are invisible. Let nothing that is on this side of the other world get within you. Set your faces like a flint; you have all power in heaven and earth on your side.

[We] remember, amid hard combat with world, flesh, and Devil, the Celestial City which is [our] destination, and the Lord Jesus who beckons [us] to life.

-Idols of the Heart and "Vanity Fair." David Powlison.



If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," and again, "The Lord will judge his people." It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10:26-31

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