Evangelicals have done a superb job of evangelizing people, bringing them to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, but they are failing to provide *believers*..."
...believers with approaches to living that keep them *going and *growing in spiritual relationship with Him.…
MANY start the life of faith with great *enthusiasm, only to discover themselves in difficulty shortly afterward. Their *high hopes and *good intentions seem to fade away. The spirit may be willing, but the flesh proves weak.… People, then, *need support* to *keep them going* when "enthusiasm" fades."
The book has grown out of the conviction that behind most wrong living is wrong thinking.
Jesus calls us, for example, to a radical purity. But I find that many Christians have no *categories for thinking clearly* about the *commands and *warnings and promises of Jesus. When he says that we should pluck out our lusting eye, he backs it up with a warning: “For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29).
Threats of going to hell because of lust are simply not the way *contemporary Christians usually talk or think. This is not because such warnings aren’t in the Bible, *but because we don’t know how to fit them together with other thoughts about grace and faith and eternal security.
We *nullify the *force of Jesus’ words because our *conceptual framework is disfigured*. Our Christian living is lamed by sub-Christian thinking about living.
I have found in almost forty years of preaching and teaching and struggling with people who *want to be authentic* Christians, that the way they think about Christian living is often +absorbed from the cultural air we breathe* [to include church culture] rather than learned from categories of Scripture.
Not only that, some of the *inherited categories of “Christian” thinking are so out of sync with the Bible that they work *against the *very obedience* they are *designed to promote.”
Claims of this book is that the Bible rarely, if ever, motivates Christian living *with gratitude*. Yet this is almost universally presented in the church as the “driving force in authentic Christian living.” I agree that gratitude is a beautiful and utterly indispensable Christian affection. No one is saved who doesn’t have it. But you will search the Bible in vain for explicit connections between gratitude and obedience.”
If gratitude was never designed as the primary motivation for radical Christian obedience, perhaps that is one reason so many efforts at *holiness abort*. Could it be that gratitude for bygone grace has been pressed to serve as the power for holiness, which only faith in future grace was designed to perform? That conviction is one of the main driving forces behind this book.”
Charles Spurgeon:
“We shall bring our Lord *most glory if we get from Him much grace. If I have much faith, so that I can take God at His Word … I shall greatly honor my Lord and King.”
Excerpt From: Piper, John. “Future Grace, Revised Edition.” Multnomah Books, 2012-09-25. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Check out this book on the iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=545154355
No comments:
Post a Comment