Here are couple of great quotes from the Of First Importance blog.

“Christ turned his back, voluntarily, deliberately, and decisively, upon all that belonged to personal glory, and all that conduced to personal gain. He recognized no limit to the extent to which His obedience to God in self-humbling must go. Whatever he found in himself to be expendable, he spent. While anything was left which could be poured forth, he poured it forth. Nothing was too small to give, or too great. This is the mind and the life which is commended to us by the example of Christ and approved by signal acts of God.”

- Alec Motyer, The Message of Philippians (Downers grove, Ill.; IVP Press), 85

“The resurrection and exaltation of Christ accomplish a new unity between heaven and earth, for Christ now has a heavenly body (1 Cor. 15:42ff), a body of glory (Phil. 3:21) and His humanity is now in heaven (Phil. 3:20f; Col. 3:1; Eph. 1:20ff; 6:9), and both serve as a pledge of the ultimate unity of the cosmos in Christ (Eph. 1:10).”

- Andrew T. Lincoln, Paradise Now and Not Yet (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 1981), 192.

“Christianity is more than a hope, however glorious. It is, even now, ‘Christ in you’! Full salvation belongs to the last day, but a real salvation belongs to the Christian here and now. If a believer cannot yet say that he is free from the presence of sin, he certainly should be able to say that he is free from the penalty of sin. And by God’s grace, it is his daily privilege to find Christ at work in him saving him from the downward pull of sin.”

—R.C. Lucas, The Message of Colossians and Philemon (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1980), 77

The Vitamin Z blog recently shared the following quote- I think understanding the principle described in it is key to sanctification.

For this purpose I labor, striving according to his power, which mightily works within me. (Col. 1:29)

The presence of God’s power does not preclude Paul’s personal struggle or energetic striving or laboring. Rather, it makes it possible. God’s power is not designed to eliminate our responsibility to work hard but to enable us to fulfill it. Paul is able to work hard because God is working hard. The latter doesn’t destroy or undermine the former.

J.I. Packer perhaps put it best when he said, “The Holy Spirit’s ordinary way of working in us is through the working of our own minds and wills. He moves us to act by causing us to see reasons for moving ourselves to act. Thus our conscious, rational selfhood, so far from being annihilated, is strengthened, and in reverent, resolute obedience we work out our salvation, knowing that God is at work in us…”

Thus we see that God has chosen to operate not independently of but only through and by means of human effort and labor. God’s energy doesn’t fall from heaven haphazardly and amorphously, but comes to us through human ministers and ministry, via human toil and struggle.

So how might we know when God is energetically and powerfully working in us? If, when you are slandered, you respond by entreating (1 Cor. 4:13), you can rest assured that divine energy is working mightily in you. If, when you are reviled, you bless instead of curse (1 Cor 4:12), you can rest assured that divine energy is working mightily in you. If, when you are persecuted, you endure (1 Cor 4:12), you can rest assured that divine energy is working mightily in you. When you are afflicted but not crushed, are perplexed but do not yield to despair, are struck down but not destroyed, you can rest assured that divine energy is working mightily in you (2 Cor 4:8-9). When you are sorrowful and still rejoice, possess nothing yet are rich, you may rest assured that divine energy is working mightily in you (2 Cor 6:10). If, when you are in poverty, you give generously and joyfully (2 Cor 8:1ff), you may rest assured that divine energy is working mightily in you.

You probably won’t feel anything. There’s no guarantee that your body will vibrate or your appearance will change. But if you find yourself responding and thinking as Jesus would, if you find yourself acting and choosing contrary to every fleshly and sinful impulse, you may rest assured that divine energy is mightily at work in you. Only in this way can we, like Paul, continue to serve and love and minister and not lose heart.

– Sam Storms, The Hope of Glory, 137-138.

The following video is a great example of the kind of sacrificial ministry that I believe we are called to as believers.  It might not look the same for us but we must begin to wrestle with how God has called to bring the gospel to our neighborhood.

It is well worth 10 minutes of your time.  (HT: Vitamin Z)

C.J. Mahaney recently posted the following reflection on our adoption in Christ.  Amazing grace!

In the ancient world a father’s inheritance was passed along to his son. If a father had no son, he had no heir. Necessitated by this dilemma, a son-less father would search for a suitable son to adopt. This adopted son would become the father’s heir.

Now think about this: God had a Son. And not only did the Father have an heir, He had a perfect Heir, a beloved and well-pleasing Heir (see Matthew 3:17, 17:5; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22, 9:35; 2 Peter 1:17).

Reflect on this: God had a Son—a perfect Heir.

Which means that under the shadow of the ancient custom:

Your adoption was unnecessary.

My adoption was unnecessary.

I was recently challenged by the following quote from the Vitamin Z blog.

Some fathers exasperate their children by being overly strict and controlling. They need to remember that rearing children is like holding a wet bar of soap—too firm a grasp and it shoots from your hand, too loose a grip and it slides away. A gentle but firm hold keeps you in control.

We cannot begin to estimate the ravages of overstrictness on the evangelical Christian community over the years. I have had occasion in my ministry to bury people who lived virtually all of their seventy years in reaction to the harsh legalism of their upbringing—lost bars no one could manage to pick up. Others were not so tragic. They came to renounce legalism Biblically and theologically, but still wrestled with it emotionally for the rest of their lives.

Why are some fathers overly strict? [1] Many because they are trying to protect their children from an increasingly Philistine culture—and smothering rules seem the best way to accomplish that. [2] Others are simply controlling personalities who use rules, money, friendship, or clout to rule their children’s lives. The Bible, read through their controlling grid, becomes a license to dominate. [3] Still others wrongly understand their faith in terms of Law rather than grace. [4] Some men are overly strict because they are concerned about what others will think. “What will they think if my child goes to this place . . . or wears this clothing . . . or is heard listening to that music?” Not a few preacher’s kids have been catapulted into rebellion because their fathers squeezed their lives to fit their parishioners’ expectations. What a massive sin against one’s children!

–R. Kent Hughes, Disciplines of a Godly Man (Wheaton: Crossway, 1991), 48–49.

A while back John Piper penned the following post for the Desiring God blog.  Read carefully- it is a little scary to look at one’s heart this deeply- but at the same time there is freedom in gazing on the glory of Christ.

As a new Christian in 1930, C. S. Lewis was learning terrible things about his heart—the unfathomable layers of pride. It is astonishing how similar his description of his own heart was to the description Jonathan Edwards gave of our inscrutable strata of self-admiration.

Here is Lewis writing to his friend Arthur, amazingly within a year after his conversion:

During my afternoon “meditations,”—which I at least attempt quite regularly now—I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sort of thoughts that do come.

And, will you believe it, one out of every three is the thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought “what an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!” I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realize I am really thinking how frightfully clever I’m going to be and how he will admire me…

And then when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It is like fighting the hydra… There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depths of self-love and self-admiration. (quoted in The Narnian by Alan Jacobs, 133)

Then we go back 200 years to the1740s when Jonathan Edwards was struggling to sort out what was wheat and what was chaff in the emotions of the Great Awakening in New England. In one of his greatest books, Religious Affections, he gives the most penetrating descriptions of Christian humility I have ever seen. The part that foreshadows Lewis goes like this:

If on the proposal of the question [Are you humble?], you answer, “No, it seems to me, none are so bad as I.” Don’t let the matter pass off so; but examine again, whether or no you don’t think yourself better than others on this very account, because you imagine you think so meanly of yourself. Haven’t you a high opinion of this humility? And if you answer again, “No; I have not a high opinion of my humility; it seems to me I am as proud as the devil”; yet examine again, whether self-conceit don’t rise up under this cover; whether on this very account, that you think yourself as proud as the devil, you don’t think yourself to be very humble. (quoted from the online works of Jonathan Edwards)

One of the reasons these two are such giants of influence is the depths of their own biblically informed self-knowledge. Layer after layer until they despaired of knowing themselves humble. Humility, it turns out isn’t the kind of thing that can be spotted in oneself and prized.

Humility senses that humility is a gift beyond our reach. If humility is the product of reaching, then we will instinctively feel proud about our successful reach. Humility is the gift that receives all things as gift. It is the fruit not of our achievement but of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22). It is the fruit of the gospel—knowing and feeling that we are desperate sinners and that Christ is a great and undeserved Savior.

Humility is the one grace in all our graces that, if we gaze on it, becomes something else. It flourishes when the gaze is elsewhere—on the greatness of the grace of God in Christ