Living in the Grip of Relentless Grace

"How can you look longingly upon Satan's offerings when the cross of Christ is in front of your eyes? Christ's love constrains our hearts to seek holiness... Only a deep grasp of the gospel has the power to bring about a deep change in your heart. It is knowing the terrible price that has already been paid for your sin that enables you to say no to sin." Iain Duguid

"This is the lesson I try to communicate to my students. Our mountaintop experiences of God and His grace are wonderful, and cause for gratitude and rejoicing. But God never leaves us on the mountaintop. Once we have been nourished and learned to obey in the sunlight of God's felt presence, surrounded by His hedge of protection, He then sends us outside the camp, into the wilderness, where the heat of temptation saps our strength and spiritual refreshment is hard to come by... This is God's way, the way of the cross, and the proper response is to rejoice in the sufferings so that we may rejoice in the glory when it is revealed. We must learn the biblical lesson that God often sends lions to chase us so that we, like Bree, can discover that we weren't going quite as fast as we could. Like Shasta, we must learn to fall off the horse and "get up again without crying and mount and fall again and yet not be afraid of falling" (Ch 1.)."

On Trumpkin the Dwarf

"Trumpkin shows us that coming to faith is not always like getting knocked off your horse by a blinding light. Sometimes it's a slow process filled with unexpected twists and turns. Sometimes those who protest the loudest are nearest to the kingdom. Sometimes the heart prepares the way for the mind to follow."

On Edmund, in the Chronicles of Narnia

"Edmund thus stands as a warning, a cautionary tale to everyone who reads the book. We are always becoming who we will be. We are, all of us, en-storied creatures, living our lives in a narrative, which means our lives have directions, trends, and trajectories. And these trajectories are guided by an Author who teaches us that we will reap what we sow. Right this minute, we are headed somewhere, and sooner or later, we are bound to end up there... Given the present trajectory of my life, what would happen if I should find myself stumbling through the wardrobe into Narnia? Will Providence guide me to meet a faun who becomes a friend, or a Witch who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy (or freeze, enchant, and murder)? Given the kind of person that I am right now becoming, what would be my reaction if I heard Aslan's  name for the first time?"

On Narnia and C.S. Lewis's use of "magic"

"This is the true picture of magic in Narnia, and its magic is mirrored in our own world. Conflicts of power and enchantments are real, and they matter. But beneath the power encounters and magical warfare is Deep Magic and Deeper, the inflexible solidity of the Moral Law and the breathtaking beauty of Sacrificial Love. Lewis reminds us that substitution is a kind of magic, a mysterious and supernatural force that transforms the world, overcoming every form of treachery. In Narnia, as in our world, Deeper Magic triumphs over Deep Magic. Through sacrifice, Mercy triumphs over Judgment." - Live Like a Narnian: Christian Discipleship in Lewis's Chronicles by Joe Rigney

“Naomi’s problem is like the struggle many of us experience. In the dark night of our souls, we imagine and worry about the worst possible scenario. In fact, we often conjure up contradictory worst case scenarios to worry about, events that cannot all happen to us. We persuade ourselves that God has abandoned us and that we have no prospects. How much unnecessary turmoil do we put ourselves through! God doesn't promise to give us the grace to survive all the scenarios we can dream up—but only to give us the grace to enable us to make it through whatever He actually brings into our lives. In fact, much of what we worry about turns out in the end not to be part of God’s plan for us after all; our worry was wasted work!” –p. 156

“The result of that attitude in our hearts may be that our lives become filled with such bitterness that we completely miss the providential marks of God’s continuing goodness to us in the midst of our difficulties. Like Naomi, we may be so busy complaining about our emptiness that we miss the fact that God has emptied our hands only in order to fill them with something so much better. Without Naomi’s emptiness, she would never have left Moab behind and returned to the land of promise.” –p.148-149

“God sometimes takes away the things that have become precious to us because they are supporting us in our life of sin and hardness of heart toward Him. Alternatively, He sometimes takes away things that were good in themselves because He wants to use our lives as a powerful testimony of the sufficiency of His relentless grace in the midst of our weakness and loss.” –p. 149

“The roads we choose for ourselves often make our deepest heart commitments plain for all to see.” – p. 133

“Once entered upon, the road to continued and deepened disobedience is often smoothly paved and provides little resistance.” – p.134

Watch! And pray.

“The God who empties us and strips away, however painfully, those precious things in which we are trusting knows what it is to be stripped of all His possessions, left alone and abandoned by His friends, and hung empty on a cross. Every tear of loss that God inflicts on us is a tear whose cost He Himself understands. The pain of God’s chastening work is therefore never harsh; it is never more than is absolutely necessary to turn us to Himself. It is measured and designed to show us the emptiness of the paths we have chosen for ourselves, so that we may return to His ways. What is more, when we do return to Him, we discover that it is His delight to fill the void we have created.” –p.138

“There should constantly be a note of celebration and joy in our worship too, for we remember the death from which we have been spared.” p. 126

“Our hearts are sometimes condemned by what we rejoice in, as well as what we worry about.” p. 125

Here's a good reminder for the upcoming holidays. :)

“But if the reversal of Purim was worth celebrating annually, as a reminder of God’s intervention in history, how much more should those who understand the Greatest Reversal of all celebrate. How much more should we find ourselves on our knees with thankfulness to God, not simply that life has gone well for us this year (if it has), but because death has been transformed into life for us in Christ.” p. 125

“The eye of faith is constantly looking beyond the visible circumstances of this world to the unseen heavenly reality, where even now Christ is enthroned for us.” P.124

“God’s sovereignty operates in such a way that our freedom and responsibility to act are not compromised, yet the result is still exactly what God has purposed from the beginning… What is more, God achieves His perfect goals not just through our best intentions and most self-sacrificing acts, but even through our greatest sins and compromises.” p. 69