Hearts Better Than Heads

... if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation (Rom 10:9-10).

It is a testimony to His grace that theological consistency is not needed to merit salvation.

A man may be evidently of God’s chosen family, and yet though elected, may not believe in the doctrine of election. I hold there are many savingly called, who do not believe in effectual calling, and that there are a great many who persevere to the end, who do not believe the doctrine of final perseverance. We do hope that the hearts of many are a great deal better than their heads. We do not set their fallacies down to any willful opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus, but simply to an error in their judgments, which we pray God to correct. We hope that if they think us mistaken too, they will reciprocate the same Christian courtesy; and when we meet around the cross, we hope that we shall ever feel that we are one in Christ Jesus

- C.H. Spurgeon, "Effects of Sound Doctrine"

Thieves in His Storehouse

Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love (Eph 4:1-2).

The Doctor once wrote that "preaching is logic on fire." But it is also true that the fire often enlivens the logic.

At least that's what happened while I was preaching to the saints at Sunriver Community Church this past Lord's Day (if you're looking for a Christ-centered and Biblically-grounded fellowship in Fresno, CA, join them!).

Working through Ephesians 4:1-6, I noted that the character qualities enjoined by the Apostle in vv. 2-3 are inextricably bound to the salvation exposited in Ephesians 1-3 (connected by that weighty "therefore" in v. 1). That is, since the Lord initiated salvation in Christ that we would be "to the praise of the glory of His grace" (1:6, 12, 14), since the Lord applied salvation in Christ to dead and hopeless sinners that "He might show the surpassing riches of His grace" (2:7), and since the Lord has given the message of salvation in Christ that "the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church" (3:10), Christians are to glorify God by living together in humility, gentleness, patience, and tolerance (4:2).

And this is when the fire of His Spirit enlivened the logic of His text for this preacher:

As we have been redeemed in Christ to bring glory to God and to display His calling in our conduct, when we lift ourselves up to one another in pride... we steal glory from God. The prideful Christian is a thief in the storehouse of the Lord of glory. When you or I shun humility, gentleness, patience, or tolerance in our life together, we wrongly claim for ourselves the praise that belongs to God alone.

I was convicted even as I spoke, the Spirit illuminating the implications of the passage in my own soul. Steal from God?! Never! Really? With every angry retort, every impatient display, and every intolerant, unloving exchange... we thieve from His storehouse.

Except We Depend

So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Phil 2:12-13).

Rigid. Cold. Self-reliant. Unspiritual. Legalistic. Such adjectives are often cast to describe those who led the Church and spoke the Word of God in times past. Yet, such misnomers are dispelled by one who was no stranger to personal resolutions or self-discipline:

I find by experience, that let me make resolutions, and do what I will, with never so many inventions, it is all nothing, and to no purpose at all, without the motions of the Spirit of God: for if the Spirit of God should be as much withdrawn from me always, as for the week past, notwithstanding all I do, I should not grow; but should languish, and miserably fade away - there is no dependence upon myself. It is to no purpose to resolve, except we depend on the grace of God; for if it were not for his mere grace, one might be a very good man one day, and a very wicked one the next.

- Jonathan Edwards, "Diary", in The Works of Jonathan Edwards.

Striving after holiness, pursuing obedience, far from self-reliance, is the result of the sovereign and sanctifying work of God's Spirit in the life of His saints for His glorious purposes.

When we truly apprehend that it is God who works within us, we will yield ourselves to His energizing work and that looks like serious, sober, militant, and prayerful self-discipline.