Tuesday, July 10, 2007

"Grace: how strange the sound"

"The kind of "grace" that many people talk about today does not require conversion in order to believe it, but assimilation and cooperation. There is no need for reconciliation, since God is already everyone's buddy. There is no need for repentance, since everyone is already trying to be good. There is no need for justification, since that presupposes guilt--and we know that guilt is simply a feeling that results from dysfunctional patterns. There is no need for peace with God, because we have never really been at war. Grace cannot be strange when the antitheses between God's holiness and our sinfulness, Christ's saving obedience and disobedience, the Holy Spirit's sovereign call and the bondage of our will become muted.
.... Grace... becomes moral uplift, encouragement, divine assistance for whatever projects of self-salvation we are currently engaged in." -Michael Horton, from Modern Reformation

This was such a fine article. Dr. Horton nails it. He explains the shallow understanding most have of grace, and he explains what genuine biblical grace is as well.

May the Lord open the eyes and ears of the Church, so that they fall prostrate once again to the awesomeness of God's amazing grace. Amen.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Don,

Great thoughts here bro. Horton nails it down indeed. I just read this quote by Tozer and it seems to go with his thoughts on grace. How can people even appreciate grace when they don't feel they need it?

"Chrisianity today is man-centered, not God-centered. "God is made to wait patiently, even respectfully, on the whims of men. The image of God currently popular is that of a distracted Father, struggling in heartbroken desperation to get people to accept a Saviour of whom they feel no need and in whom they have very little interest. To persuade these self-sufficient souls to respond to His generous offers God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship methods and talking down to them in the chummiest way imaginable. This view of things is, of course, a kind of religious romanticism which, while it often uses flattering and sometimes embarassing terms in praise of God, manages nevertheless to make man the star of the show." A.W. Tozer

donsands said...

I love Tozer! Excellent quote.
And his thoughts are how many years ago?