Today’s Daily Light:
Continuing this weeks article by Owen Strachan: You Can Anger God But Not Lose Him
The Practical Effects of God’s Displeasure with Sin
The Christian is not to live in abject fear of God’s discipline. However, it is also true that sin is not to abound because grace abounds. It is the other way around (Rom. 5:20). We are to hate sin and to love grace. We cannot be laissez-faire about holiness. While it is marvelously true that Christ has won our salvation, we must not forget that he works with us to mold and make us into the new creation that we are (2 Cor. 5:17). Furthermore, we strive for holiness in order to win crowns and treasures in heaven and avoid displeasing the Lord (Matt. 6:20; see also Eph. 6; 1 John 1).
We do so through faith given of God. John Piper said as much in his Pleasures of God: “We should never think of obedience as something unattached to saving faith as though the one could exist for long without the other. Obedience to Christ is the necessary result of true faith” (247). Put differently by German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the one who believes obeys, and the one who obeys believes (Cost of Discipleship, 68). True belief in the true Christ drives true holiness.
Let’s consider a picture of this. Our spiritual lives resemble a long car drive through winding terrain—think Pilgrim’s Progress for the interstate generation. We keep our eyes on the distant horizon while paying attention to any number of possible problems on the road directly before us. We need both a bigger view of a grand God and careful attention to the sins that so easily beset us in our daily lives to make it safely through to the other side. It is not one perspective or the other that we need; it is indubitably both.
And Dear Father…help us to start each day visualizing how grand and glorious You are..and thus to let ‘that ‘view’ influence each day’s activities… ‘so that’ we can maximize bearing eternal fruit. Amen
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