Jayna Baas’s Reviews > The Normal Christian Life > Status Update

“When [Christ] is really precious to our souls, nothing will be too good, nothing too costly for him; everything we have, our dearest, most priceless treasure, we shall pour out upon him, and we shall not count it a shame to have done so.”

“Seemingly everyone else is being blessed and used, while you yourself have been passed by and are losing out. Lie quiet. All is in darkness, but it is only for a night. It must indeed be a full night, but that is all. Afterwards you will find that everything is given back to you in glorious resurrection; and nothing can measure the difference between what was before and what now is!”

“[Some Christians] are trying to look within, to differentiate, to discriminate, to analyze, and in doing so are bringing themselves into deeper bondage. Now this is a situation which is really dangerous to Christian life, for inward knowledge will never be reached along the barren path of self-analysis. … Christ is our light; and he is the living Word. As we read the Scriptures, that life in him brings revelation.”

“We only see history back to the Fall. God sees it from the beginning. There was something in God’s mind before the Fall, and in the ages to come that thing is to be fully realized. … It is the Body of Christ in glory, expressing nothing of fallen man, but only that which is the image of the glorified Son of man.”

I love his explanation of Genesis 2 as the picture of God’s plan to create a Bride for his Son.

“[God] is not a retailer dispensing grace to us in packets, measuring out some patience to the impatient, some love to the unloving, some meekness to the proud, in quantities that we take and work on as a kind of capital. He has given only one gift to meet all our need: his Son Christ Jesus. As I look to him to live out his life in me, he will be humble and patient and loving and everything else I need—in my stead.”

“God knows who I am; he knows that from head to foot I am full of sin; he knows that I am weakness incarnate; that I can do nothing. The trouble is that I do not know it. I admit that all men are sinners, and that therefore I am a sinner; but I imagine that I am not such a hopeless sinner as some. God must bring us all to the place where we see that we are utterly weak and helpless.” (Chapter 9)

“All is because of [the Lord Jesus]; nothing is because of me. Remission of sins is not based on human merit, but on the Lord’s crucifixion; regeneration is not based on human merit, but on the Lord’s resurrection; and the enduement with the Holy Spirit is not based on human merit, but on the Lord’s exaltation.”

I love how this book always points back to Jesus.

“Man’s thought is always of the punishment that will come to him if he sins, but God’s thought is always of the glory man will miss if he sins. The result of sin is that we forfeit God’s glory: the result of redemption is that we are qualified again for glory. God’s purpose in redemption is glory, glory, glory.”

All I can say to that is “Glory!”

“I sin because I am a sinner. We are apt to think that what we have done is very bad, but that we ourselves are not so bad. God is taking pains to show us that we ourselves are wrong, fundamentally wrong. … Our sins are dealt with by the Blood, but we ourselves are dealt with by the Cross. The Blood procures our pardon for what we have done; the Cross procures our deliverance from what we are.”

“What, after all, is your basis of approach to God? Do you come to him on the uncertain ground of your feeling, the feeling that you may have achieved something for God today? Or is your approach based on something far more secure, namely, the fact that the Blood has been shed and that God looks on the Blood and is satisfied?”