“Many Christians have grown up in the church on moralistic preaching; that is, preaching that calls for obedience without connecting the commands of God to the cross of Christ”
“Naked commands, separated from the character of God, lack both weight and compelling beauty”
“God does not reveal his will so that we can build our confidence in our ability to keep it, but so that we can exalt and exult in the God we know by grace”
Read more on Killing Moralism here
“Jesus says that the root of anxiety is inadequate faith in our Father’s future grace. As unbelief gets the upper hand in our hearts, one of the effects is anxiety. The root cause of anxiety is a failure to trust all that God has promised to be for us in Jesus.” (page 25, see Matthew 6:25-34)
“The itch of self-regard craves the scratch of self-approval.” (page 49)
“You must think that your protection hangs on you. And even though you are not sure that your own resources will take care of you, yet you opt for fragile self-reliance, rather than faith in future grace.” (page 52)
“Because pride does not like to admit that it has anxieties. And if pride has to admit it, it still does not like to admit that the remedy might be trusting someone else who is wiser and stronger.” (page 53)
“The opposite of impatience is not a glib denial of loss. It’s a deepening, ripening place of obedience, and to walk with God at the unplanned pace of obedience-to wait in his place and go at his pace.” (page 71)
“Patience is an evidence of inner strength. Impatient people are weak, and therefore dependent on external supports-like schedules that go just right and circumstances that support their fragile hearts.” (page 74)
Battling Unbelief by John Piper (page 49)
“The Heart Is the Organ of Worship Because the heart is so active with its passions, affections, and desires, it is the organ with which we worship. Deuteronomy 11:16 warns, “Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them.” Jesus says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:8–9).” (location 1307 Kindle edition)
“We need more than moral reformation and behavioral modification. We need inner cleansing, spiritual renewal, and new hearts, and God does that for us!” (location 1522 Kindle edition)
“The apostle Peter teaches that a lack of ongoing transformation in our lives comes from forgetting what God has done for us in the gospel (2 Peter 1:3-9). If we are to grow into maturity in Christ, we must deepen and enlarge our understanding of the gospel as God’s appointed means for personal and communal transformation.”
[The gospel] “is not just the means of our salvation, but the means of our transformation. It is not simply deliverance from sin’s penalty, but release from sins power. The gospel is what makes us right with God (justification) and it is also what frees us to delight in God (sanctification). The gospel changes everything!”
“The more I grow in my Christian life, the more I grow in my awareness of God’s holiness and of my flesh and sinfulness.” … “But my awareness of both is growing. I am increasingly seeing God as he actually is (Isaiah 55:8-9) and myself as I actually am (Jeremiah 7:9-10).” … “As my understanding of my sin and of God’s holiness grows, something else grows: my appreciation and love for Jesus.” … “The cross looms larger and more central in my life as I rejoice in the Savior who died upon it.”
“Because of the indwelling sin that remains in me, I have an ongoing tendency to minimize the gospel or ‘shrink the cross.’ This happens when I either (a) minimize God’s perfect holiness, thinking of him as something less than his Word declares him to be, or (b) elevate my own righteousness, thinking of myself as better than I actually am. The cross becomes smaller and Christ’s importance in my life is diminished.”
“We need to identify, admit, and feel the depth of our brokenness and sinfulness.”
“Our hope is not in our own goodness, nor in the vain expectation that God will compromise his standards and ‘grade on a curve.’ Rather, we rest in Jesus as our perfect Redeemer – the One who is ‘our righteousness, holiness and redemption’ (1 Corinthians 1:30).”
-Exerted from The Gospel-Centered Life by World Harvest Mission, pages 8-10. Download a sample of chapter 1 here
“There is no way to get people to do more than to constantly show them what Christ has already done for them”
“External compliance without heart change is shallow and short lived”
“men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.”
-John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. Henry Beveridge; Accordance electronic ed. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), n.p.
“But in the end the sovereignty of God and the power of the gospel of Jesus, not the feasibility of our human plans, is the rock of hope and encouragement.”
–Finish the Mission by John Piper
“Regeneration, which Richard Lovelace calls “the beachhead of sanctification in the soul,” is God’s mysterious work of imparting new life to the soul.”
Christ Formed in You by Brian Hedges
“All too often, religious people view their acts of piety or moral efforts as a means of gaining acceptance with God. Check yourself now. Even if you’ve been a Christian for a long time, don’t you sometimes feel like God is more pleased with you on days when you’ve been faithful in daily devotions than those rushed days when you neglected time in the Word and prayer? Do you tend to view your relationship with God as a long list of “do’s and don’ts”? Is your obedience to God motivated by love and characterized by joy—or guilt and fear? Is it easy for you to admit your failures and take ownership of your sins? Or does the possibility of being exposed feel threatening to your sense of well-being?
Like Luther, our relationship with God can easily become based on our own performance, rather than the performance of Christ. Even good spiritual disciplines, such as Bible-reading, prayer, and worship, become in our minds, like rungs on the ladder to heaven. We may not express it this way. In fact, we might even deny it. But functionally, and practically, we live as if approval from God depended upon our obedience, instead of Christ’s obedience for us.”
–Christ Formed in You by Brian Hedges
“Faith is believing in and relying upon God. It is “not a work, but a relinquishment of all work, an unqualified trust in God who gives life to the dead (Rom. 4:17), who raised Christ from the dead (4:24), who in Christ gave ‘a righteousness from God.’”
–Christ Formed in You by Brian Hedges (location 1094 Kindle Edition)
The Gospel Centered Life 