Longing for the perfection of transformation

"Christians today will understand that biblically authentic Christianity is never merely a matter of rules and regulations, of public liturgy and private morality. Biblical Christianity results in transformed men and women - men and women who, because of the power of the Spirit of God, enjoy regenerated natures. We want to please God, we want to be holy, we want to confess Jesus is Lord. In short, because of the grace secured by Christ's cross, we ourselves experience something of a transforming moral imperative: the sins we once loved we Lear to fear and hate, the obedience and holiness we once disposed we now hunger for. God help us, we are woefully inconsistent in all this, but we have already tasted enough of the powers of the age to come that we know what a transforming moral imperative feels like in our lives, and we long for its perfection at the final triumph of Christ."

Dr D A Carson, Scandalous: The ironies of the cross. Pages 31-32

An all knowing God

Had the great privilege to share a message at MKCC this past Sunday in our series Awesome God. My subject an all knowing God. You can watch it in the video below.

Christ Alone

We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is "of Him". If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in His anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth....if we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission from the curse, in his cross....in short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.

- John Calvin (institutes 2.16.19) 

Christ all in all

"The religion taught in the New Testament, is Christianity in the most emphatic and peculiar sence of the term, "Christ is all in all". It is his religion. It is all by Him; it is all about Him; he is its author, he is its substance; he is the sum of this system, the soul of this body.

Everything is viewed in its connection with Him. Every doctrine and every precept, every privilege and every duty, every promise and every threatening. The ground of acceptance is His sacrifice; the source of life and light, holiness and peace, His Spirit; the rule of duty, his law; the pattern for imitation, His example; the motives to duty, His authority and grace; the great end of all, His glory, God's glory in Him....let the language of our hearts be that of the dying Martyr: "None but Christ, none but Christ"."

- John Brown (commentary on 1 Peter 2)