Tag: Gospel

Posted on

What We Believe – The Grace of God

This is an ongoing series of posts based on short papers written for our church’s elder class and edited (and in some cases, expanded) for this format. Today’s writing prompt: “What is your view of God’s grace?”

God’s grace is a subject that is on my mind daily, every hour as I struggle against sin or feel the weight of failure. The beauty of His grace in my life is has been transformative in the way I’ve grown, and yet it provides so much relief from the weight of the fact that on my own, I am utterly incapable of doing what is pleasing to God. God showers the whole world with His grace even as it revolves daily in rebellion – rain falls on saved and unsaved alike, happiness and joy persist even for the most virulent atheist. His common grace is a sign of who God is – the loving Creator and Father of all of us. Yet the grace that we seek is the grace that is available in Christ. This is the special grace that saves all who receive it, all who stand in Christ in faith. I think about this often, as I pray and work after my desire to grow into the image of Christ.

What is grace?

Grace could be described as the application of God’s love. His love is shown in all creation through grace as I mentioned, by His provision of our needs. God provides for our need for food, in abundance and variety. He “sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” He gives both work and rest to humanity.

And more than that, He provides an abundance of beauty in our world, of a form that humans continue to seek to recreate through our own artistic methods. I’m reminded of what I like to call the “Holmes apologetic,” from a Sherlock Holmes story where the detective stops mid-thought to remark on the beauty of flowers, and how a flower’s “smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives these extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” When we look at nature and consider it, from the incredibly minute detail of particles so small no eye could see them, to vast stellar nurseries discovered deep in our galaxy and beyond, the artistry of God demonstrates His love for his creation.

In theological terms, we see two concepts of grace: what is called “common grace,” which is God’s provision for our existence and for creation itself, and “special (or saving) grace,” which is His provision of salvation in Christ. Common grace is what I described above, in God’s provision for all His creation. Special grace is not given to all, but to His people – to all who believe in the name of Jesus and look to Him for life and hope. For those who do not, God’s common grace will ultimately become a condemnation – they received God’s goodness while refusing to worship Him as God.

As Paul says in Romans 1, the truth of God seen in creation is not new information to humanity. We know this, but we also “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” In our sin and our refusal to honor our Creator, we deny God’s handiwork as being special or of showing His glory. We allow cynical, nihilistic beliefs to draw us into attitudes of self-absorption, rather than humility. But humility is the key that unlocks the gate to the way of Christ, a humility brought about by the conviction of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of those who hear the gospel and by God’s grace respond. In Romans 3:23 Paul writes that “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” But Paul answers this problem with the only possible solution: the grace that is given to us through the sacrifice of Jesus. We are all tainted by sin, and there is no way we can “un-sin” by our own means – as Isaiah writes, even our attempts to do good are tainted by our evil desires before God. But the special grace of Christ truly and perfectly covers our sin, and He delights to administer that to us each day, as our great high priest before the Father. 

God’s grace transforms our hearts

Paul continues in that chapter to demonstrate that humility is the necessary consequence of this realization – boasting in ourselves “is excluded” he writes, “by a law of faith.” Our way is not a free ticket to do what we please because God doesn’t care any longer. His grace creates in us a realization that we have received what we do not and could never deserve.  And as that truth works inward like a seed that is sprouting out of the ground, it changes us bit by bit, breaking away hard-hearted and selfish attitudes and bringing idols to light so they may be thrown down. God’s saving grace shows us that truly resting in God for all our needs, from the most basic to the most profound, is precisely the life God intends for us to live in Him, now and in eternity. As Charles Spurgeon said, “The more grace we have, the less we shall think of ourselves, for grace, like light, reveals our impurity.”

I remember how this happened in my own life, and the moment I experienced that deep conviction of my own sin even as I also felt a tremendous sense of joy of knowing that Jesus was, in fact, enough. It was during a sermon many years ago that the Holy Spirit used as a transformative moment beyond description, and I think about that day often, even as I think about the days and years to come walking the path of Christ.

This applied love of grace is not simply an expression of pity, though pity could be said to share in it. When God saw the sorry state of Adam and Eve in the garden, even though He surely was not surprised by any turn of events, might pity not have had its place in His promise that the woman’s offspring would destroy the enemy and his work? When Jesus stood among weeping mourners at the tomb of Lazarus and joined in their tears, pity surely must have been one of the feelings he bore as he demonstrated the great hope of life that was His gift to humanity, when he called Lazarus forth from the tomb. But this great love expresses the perfect love in unity shared by Father, Son, and Spirit. Again returning to Romans, Paul writes in chapter 5 that “God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 

Knowing that, we can bring our heavy burdens to Him. We can truly obey the call of Psalm 55:22, to “cast all our burdens on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never allow the righteous to be shaken.” We often do feel shaken, it is true, but God knows our needs and provides for them, in His love, by His grace. The more we realize this grace, the more we lower our own self-estimations, and raise our worshipful attitudes in expressing that love we have received to God, and to one another.

Living in His grace

The implications for our day to day lives are nothing short of tremendous. Yet they are also the implications that we often find ourselves blinded to the most by our day to day lives, our personal sin struggles and sufferings, and even our successes. When we build our lives around His grace, we find a rest that supports and extends far beyond all our earthly hopes, because life in Christ itself likewise is far beyond our brief years in this world. 

I want to end with three ideas of ways we can grow in the grace of God in our daily lives:

  • Pursue the things that bring His grace to mind. This can be done in many ways, from taking time to reflect on the beauty of God’s grace in nature and the goodness of His provision for your life in things like a good meal, to meditating on the testimony of Scripture and the teachings of those who have pursued this deeply. 
  • Find ways to express the ways you’ve seen God’s grace move in your life. You don’t have to have a big formal journaling effort, though keeping a personal record of the ways you experience God’s grace is a good idea. When dark times come, being able to remember that God’s presence has not lessened is wise.
  • Don’t try to walk alone. Have people who are close to you, who you trust and who knows you. When hardship comes and clouds fill the horizon of life, have someone who can encourage and pray with you. This should be a person who can listen to confessions of the sins, fears and failures of your life and remind you of your true worth in Christ. My podcast cohost Jake is a person like this for me, someone who I turn to often when I’m needing to talk about life struggles or confess sins.

None of this is dynamic and new, but then that’s not the point. The goal is to build a reminder into our lives of the constant grace of God, and the Holy Spirit has given us so many ways to do so through the Word, through prayer, and through the people around us. Pursue the grace of Christ daily, and the day will come where both suffering and success in this world will be a dim memory compared with the joy of truly being in the presence of Jesus. My prayer for everyone who reads this is that you will strive each day towards that moment for yourself.

How has the grace of God impacted your life? How do you want to see God move further in your life and transform your heart? Leave a comment below or email us, prayer requests are welcome!

Posted on

Episode 4 – That’s What Christmas is All About

We’re wrapping up 2024 and celebrating Christmas with a wide ranging conversation. We recorded this a little over a week ago and covered everything from Christmas music preferences both sacred and secular, to why it’s still okay to be against murder while also believing the American health care system is broken, to the struggle of genuine engagement online and more. Tune in and listen!

Leave your comments below or email us with your thoughts and prayer requests.

Posted on

What We Believe – The Work of Christ

In this ongoing series I am publishing slightly edited versions of short papers I wrote for my church’s elder pipeline class. The prompt for this paper was, “What did Christ accomplish on the cross?”

We have talked about who Christ is – He is the Son of God, He is a man born at a certain place in a certain time, He is the fulfillment of prophecy and a prophet Himself. But it is that last part that we must look to now, not just who He is, but what He has done, and continues to do. We cannot examine the work of Jesus without looking closely at the central focus of His whole life: the cross, His death there, and His resurrection. This was no mere display of power, nor is it simply a tragedy we mourn as unjust. This was the point at which God inaugurated His kingdom, and began the work that will conclude when Jesus returns: namely, the restoration of creation to true holiness, and true and total intimacy between God and His people.

Firstly, Jesus atoned for the sins of His people. There has been much debate over the concept of penal substitutionary atonement and its centrality to what Christ accomplished on the cross, but the testimony of Scripture is clear. All those who draw near to Christ receive the benefits of His atonement, just as all those who drew near on the Day of Atonement each year received those benefits for their sins. The difference is that Christ’s atonement is a better one, for it does not need to be renewed year after year, but as the author of Hebrews says, it is completed and perfect. 

Continue reading “What We Believe – The Work of Christ”
Posted on

Episode 3: Back At It – Papers, Prayers and Passions in Life

After a hectic summer Dave and Jake are back together talking about life, music, new babies, and much more. Our church’s elder class recently wrapped up and we’ve been publishing these piecemeal on the podcast website. We’re also going to begin turning these into podcast episodes, so we spent a little time talking about the purpose of these as well as our hopes for the future of this class. 

Some of the books we talked about in this episode:

Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture – by Christopher Watkin

Art and Faith: A Theology of Making – by Makoto Fujimura

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution – by Carl Trueman

Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms – by Justin Whitmel Earley

Follow Coronation Radio on Facebook

Visit our website for more content

Email us

Posted on

What we believe – Who is Jesus?

In this ongoing series I am publishing slightly edited versions of short papers I wrote for my church’s elder pipeline class. The prompt for this paper was, “What is your view of Jesus Christ?”

The question “what is your view of Jesus” could receive so broad an answer that literally, many books exist just to tackle it. I want to address this by answering three specific questions that serve as the foundation upon which Christology is built.

Continue reading “What we believe – Who is Jesus?”
Posted on

What We Believe – The Imago Dei

This series is taken from short papers I wrote for my church’s elder class in response to different questions. This week’s question: What does it mean that man is an image-bearer of God?

Genesis 1 contains the account of God creating everything, day by day. Each part of creation has its place and is authored by God’s will, and each part is declared to be good. In verse 26, humanity is created specially and uniquely, “in our image, according to our likeness,” as the passage reads. But we struggle with understanding what it means to be truly made in His image. With the fall of man in chapter three of the same book, we see that humanity takes on a desire to be God. In the subsequent chapters and books and continuing down through human history, people have tried to make gods in the image of humanity, either literally or in the reckoning of what we believe is powerful. 

If we look in a mirror, we see an image of ourselves created for that moment, the product of light reflected off a surface that displays what we look like. But it is not us, and it only exists as long as we choose to stand there. Walk away, and the image vanishes, yet we continue. In her book Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age, Rosaria Butterfield uses this analogy to explain this unique relationship between God and man, one that is not shared by any other aspect of creation. She says, “God is the object in the biblical creation account, and we are the reflection.” 

Her analogy is rooted in the one Paul uses to express the longing we experience in this life as we look toward a future of truly seeing and knowing God in 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known.” And he follows it up with a very telling concluding verse to chapter 13: “Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love—but the greatest of these is love.”  

Love is what flows from God to His creation, and most especially to humanity. Love is what propels Him to mercy when Adam and Eve sin, and to promise a redeemer who will restore what they have broken. Love drives God to display mercy to the Israelites over and over, to be patient beyond any human reckoning, as generation after generation falls into rebellion and idolatry and requires reminding again that there is only one true God. And most of all, love is what drives the Trinitarian work of salvation – love within the Trinity, and love of God for His creation, for His image seen in His people. To acknowledge that we are made in His image is to accept and share in His tremendous love, and to rest in that love and all the promises it carries for provision, protection, and ultimate salvation in this world and the next.

By the same token, to deny that we are made in God’s image is to deny that love, and to deny the very thing that makes us human, more than just animals with higher intelligence and greater emotional capacity. Sin is an attack on that image. The first sin in Genesis 3 was a denial of God as creator and ruler, and an attempt to assert the right to decide right and wrong apart from Him. Murder is a vicious assault on God’s image, and carries the death penalty in Israel’s law because to kill a man is to destroy that image. Idolatry is a sin because it says that a man may know better what God should be, than the One who created us.

When the author of Hebrews describes Jesus in chapter 1, he calls him “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature,” that is to say, while we are made in the image of God, Christ is the image of God. When we trust in Christ, we are looking to He who bears the unscarred, unbroken perfection of God’s image in His humanity, and the perfect power and total authority of God in His divinity.

When we place our trust in Jesus, when we preach the power of His name and the love and mercy of God found in Him, we are calling out to all humanity with a tremendous message. We are saying, “Stop trying to be something you are not, and remember that you are something so much greater in creation – you are made to reflect the perfect, the complete, the holy.” When we preach the gospel we say to our listeners, “Be who God made you to be, because to be His image is to find true life that transcends anything your base desires in this world could hope to find.”

How does knowing that you are made in the image of God affect your view of yourself and others? How can this empower you in your walk with Christ and the way you love your neighbor? Let us know below in the comments!

Posted on

What We Believe – Our God is Three in One

This is a continuing series based on short papers I wrote for my church’s elder class to prepare for discussions of different doctrinal questions. This week’s prompt: What is your view of the Trinity?

The doctrine of God’s existence as one being in three persons is one of the most controversial and defining doctrines of the faith. It is sensible that discussion of this topic follows an exploration of the nature of Scripture, because it is through a belief in the character of Scripture as God-breathed and therefore infallible and supreme that we must arrive at the conclusion that the doctrine of the Trinity is true. 

As with so many doctrines, it was defined in the face of error. It is tempting to linger on these errors in a historical sense, and it is important to understand them because so often people tend to repeat them. There are whole offshoot faiths from Christianity that are founded on denials of various aspects of the Trinity – for example, United Pentacostals who hold to a modalistic view of God, or Jehovah’s Witnesses who insist that Jesus is a mere created being. But it’s important to define what we do believe, rather than just what we do not. 

Looking back at the early discussions in the church that hashed out the doctrine and the way it is stated across denominational lines to this day, we see the priorities of these believers as they examined what the Scriptures say for the sake of clarifying teaching and avoiding error. We see them prioritizing the nature of God, and the distinction between God’s being (or substance, to use the Nicene term) and the persons of the Trinity, who Scripture reveals as unique in role and action, yet utterly united in will and fully bearing the nature of being God.

We see the early church’s recognition that for salvation to be effective, Christ must be fully man and fully God. He must be fully man so that He may share in our existence and bear our suffering and sin upon the cross, and He must be fully God so that He may endure in a way no mere sinful human ever could alone. We see the Father as the one who declares the nature of creation and trajectory of history through His perfect plans. He does not do anything alone, but plays His own unique role in sending forth the Son and blessing His work. He calls all those who will be Christ’s. And we see the Holy Spirit as the one who ministers constantly through and in Christ’s church, to glorify Christ and to be the “Giver of Life” as the Council of Constantinople put it, as He makes possible Christ’s words from John 3 that to be saved, we “must be born again.”

God’s Trinitarian nature is beyond our comprehension in many ways, but that itself is evidence of it being a revelation of God and not a production of man’s own mind. The legion of heresies that the church has contended with through the centuries show what happens when humans attempt to apply their own wisdom to God’s nature. From Sabellius teaching that the persons of the Trinity are little more than masks worn by one being of God, to Arius’ claims that “there was a time that the Son was not” and his theological children in groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to outright polytheists like the Mormons, many times man refuses to be satisfied by trusting to what God says but insists that he has better wisdom. Yet none of them can truly say they believe that Scripture is God’s Word, when they refuse to heed God’s own revelations of Himself. They cannot claim to have true salvation in a Christ who is not who He said He was, in His own words – “I am.” 

To rest in God’s promises we must trust in the words of Deuteronomy 29:29, “The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law.” We cannot truly reckon as created, mortal, singular beings with the true nature of existence for an eternal, Trinitarian God, but we can trust that He is truthful and trustworthy. We rely on Him to grasp this, and His work and Word calls us to let our doubts and confusion rest on His promises.

Do you have questions or areas where you struggle to understand? Please ask them below or email me if you prefer, our hope here is to bless the body and engage in dialogue.

Posted on

What We Believe – The Gospel in the Old Testament

In this continuing series, I am posting short papers I’ve written for my church’s elder class on different topics. This week’s paper is on finding the gospel in the Old Testament.

When I was young, I remember that at the church we went to, “preaching the gospel” referred specifically to sermons that were on the story of Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection. We weren’t a terribly expository church in terms of the approach that was taken to Scripture, and this meant that “preaching the gospel” happened maybe a couple times a year.

But the truth is, the gospel is a much bigger concept than that, and in fact, it is seen all throughout Scripture. Some take this idea and apply it in ways that go beyond good hermeneutical principles, with one more extreme example being something like, any reference to the word “rock” is a reference to Christ because Christ is the rock upon which we are to build our lives, as Jesus says in a parable in Matthew 7.

But we truly can see the gospel all throughout the Scriptures. The Old Testament constantly points ahead to the person and work of Jesus Christ, and if we look at the whole message of the gospel, we can see how this works. It’s not that every part of the Old Testament points to the entire gospel, but that it touches on different elements all throughout. To illustrate this I want to introduce a tool I’ve borrowed from the Simeon Trust preaching workshops, a truly excellent program I think everyone who aspires to teach and preach in their churches should consider taking part in at least once. That tool is what is referred to as the Eternal Gospel Timeline:

Each section of the diagram points to different points in the life and work of Jesus, from His existence in eternity past before the incarnation (“before” being a relative term of course, given the timeless nature of eternity), to the different elements of His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and beyond – His current position as the firstborn of those who will receive eternal life, and to our future hope in His return and the restoration of creation to sinless perfection.

Using this tool, I will take three passages in view and argue how they point to different elements of the gospel as this diagram breaks it down. These aren’t intended to be exhaustive, but simply brief summaries that could be expanded upon in sermons or other settings.

Isaiah 14:1-2

This passage is a break between two long poetic sections of prophecy, running from all of chapter 13 and 14:3-21, where God pronounces judgment upon Babylon, who had taken the remaining tribes of Israel into captivity (after Assyria had taken the 10 tribes of Samaria). Prior to this section God declares that Babylon itself will be destroyed, and subsequent to it, that the king of Babylon will lose everything and fall from the greatest heights to the deepest depths.

These two verses are held to point to the return of Israel to its lands seen in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and certainly that is true, especially in the fulfillment of phrases such as “The nations will escort Israel and bring it to its homeland.” But even in those books we don’t see a total fulfillment of this prophecy in that time, because while the Israelites did return with the support of the Persian king and enjoyed their protection while they began to rebuild, they certainly did not “possess them as male and female slaves in the LORD’s land” or “make captives of their captors and…rule over their oppressors.”

The greater fulfillment in Christ can be seen in the eternal future, when there is no longer any animosity remaining between Jew and Gentile but all are one in Christ, and worship Him together in a kingdom without end. Isaiah draws this picture out further in chapter 60, as he describes Zion as the center of all human commerce and worship, where all the peoples of the world will come to pay tribute to God and to God’s own people.

Deuteronomy 26:16-19

This passage sees God summarizing the covenant to Israel, and reminding them of His promises if they fulfill the covenant and obey His laws. Of course, Israel did not do so, repeatedly falling into idolatry throughout their history. But we see this fulfilled finally in the consummation of all things, when Christ stands in the place of His people as the one who has perfectly honored and fulfilled God’s law in life, and taken on the punishment due His people in death.

In Christ we have a better Adam who we can rest in (Romans 5:12-21), and who receives glory in His triumph that we can rejoice in (Revelation 5:6-14). In Christ we find success in our desires to walk in His ways, to keep His statutes, laws and ordinances, and to obey Him, and in that restoration of creation we will see that finally fulfilled before our eyes.

Psalm 88

In this desperate cry to God for help, the sons of Korah cry out with the agony of an Israelite suffering not just from an enemy’s attack, but under God’s own wrath. Death is approaching, and is here, as the psalmist pleads with God for mercy. We see throughout this psalm the agony of Jesus dying, and the mourning ache of His burial, the questions of God’s silence in the face of such a loss that weighed on His disciples’ minds in the days before His resurrection.

The heart of suffering sees its cause in God’s own will, yet also trusts to God as the one who will bring a perfect resolution to that suffering, as Jesus did. When we walk through times of suffering as believers, we see in passages like this that our circumstances are not out of God’s control, but rather, that even in this His will is accomplished. We are also reminded that to suffer in this world is a tiny thing in the face of the glory of eternity with God.

This is only a small sample, but we can use this same method to work through the entire Old Testament. Because Jesus and His work are the lynchpin of all of Scripture, He truly provides the lens through which we can understand the entire Bible, and through Him we can preach the gospel from every passage.

Take some of your favorite Old Testament passages and use the diagram above to see how it points to the gospel. Share your thoughts and questions below!