carrcoff > Recent Status Updates

“…salvation is of the Lord, and the prepositional phrase denotes possession. Salvation belongs to God alone, to no one else. If someone is saved, it is wholly God’s doing. It is not a matter of God saving you partly and you saving yourself partly. No. God saves us. We do not and cannot save ourselves. That’s the gospel.” (80)

“Any time we take the attributes of the gods the world around us worships and apply them to God to make him more palatable and less threatening, more accommodating and less thunderous, we produce a graven image. We whittle down his transcendence, we paint over his sovereignty, we chisel away his omnipotence until he is a pet-like version of the terrible pagan god we would never be so foolish as to bow down to.”

“Like Israel, we affirm that there are no other gods verbally and intellectually. Practically, we live as polytheists. Our idolatry is a "both-and" arrangement: I need God and I need __.
In our minds, we rationalize that the "both-and" still offers God some form or degree of worship, so everything must be okay. Yet, to cease to worship God alone is to corrupt any worship still offered to him.”

“Lawfulness is Christlikeness. To obey the law is to look like Jesus Christ. While legalism builds self-righteousness, lawfulness builds righteousness. Obedience to the law is the means of sanctification for the believer. We serve the risen Christ, ‘Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works’ (Titus 2:14).”

[Why get out of bed? Why live?]
“It’s the most essential question in life. And it’s not morose. What’s morose is pretending that none of this matters. And the thing is, you must have an answer ready because you don’t know when you’ll need it, and when you need it, you won’t have the time, energy, or willpower to go looking for answers. ‘When the time comes there will be no time.’”

“…the Lord is “only” like this “all the days of my life” (23:6). Every. Single. Day. Always. He has no off days and no half-hearted days. No days where instead of pursuit he dawdles in his goodness or forgets to follow in his mercy. No days where he drops the ball and sends badness and hatred instead of goodness and love.”