God’s valuation of His people is established by His valuation of Christ
D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 176.
Category Archives: D. A. Carson
God Is More Interested in Our Holiness Than in Our Comfort
God is more interested in our holiness than in our comfort. He more greatly delights in the integrity and purity of his church than in the material well-being of its members. He shows himself more clearly to men and women who enjoy him and obey him than to men and women whose horizons revolve around good jobs, nice houses, and reasonable health. He is for more committed to building a corporate “temple” in which his Spirit dwells than he is in preserving our reputations. He is more vitally disposed to display his grace than to flatter our intelligence. He is more concerned for justice than for our ease. He is more deeply committed to stretching our faith than our popularity. He prefers that his people live in disciplined gratitude and holy joy rather than in pushy self-reliance and glitzy happiness. He wants us to pursue daily death, not self-fulfillment, for the latter leads to death while the former leads to life.
D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 200.
The Measure of Christ’s Torment
Biblically faithful Christianity does not present itself as a nice religious structure that makes happier parents and well-ordered children and good taxpaying citizens. It may produce better parents and taxpaying citizens, but the issues at stake in biblical Christianity have to do with eternity: heaven and hell, matters of the utmost significance, your relationship to your Maker, what God has provided in Christ, what the cross is about, the resurrection.
At the end of the day, what hell measures is how much Christ paid for those who escape hell. The measure of his torment (in ways I do not pretend to begin to understand) as the God-man is the measure of torment that we deserve and he bore. And if you see that and believe it, you will find it difficult to contemplate the cross for very long without tears.
If God Answered All Prayers Immediately
If God were to answer all prayers the instant they were uttered, He would become an automaton, the power link in a clever bit of magic. He would not be the God who wisely responds to His people, and who disposes of all things according to His sovereign goodness, but a powerful genie constrained by a magic bottle called prayer.
D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 116-117.
Christ Who Suffered in Our Place
My thoughts and prayers are with the grieving families in Newtown, CT. The Christmas season was the beginning of the life of the one who can best identify with them, being the one who Himself is a man of sorrows and well-acquainted with grief. Jesus knows and understands, and He is present with those who suffering at this time. God bless them all!
Sometimes it is when we suffer, when we observe the universality of death’s decree, when we are debilitated, when we observe an extraordinarily barbaric bit of cruelty, when we are sidelined by a chronic illness, that we are impelled to pause and reflect on the love of God to sinners and rebels such as we are. We serve the Lord Christ, who suffered in our place, who learned obedience through the trials that he suffered. The trinkets and baubles that otherwise capture so much of our attention fade away, and the eternal things assume their rightful place. Then we know what it means to confess that God’s love is ‘as shoreless and endless as eternity.’
D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 194.
An Outpost of Heaven
The church is to see itself as an outpost of heaven. It is a microcosm of the new heaven and the new earth, brought back, as it were, into our temporal sphere. We are still contaminated by failures, sin, relapses, rebellion, self-centeredness; we are not yet what we ought to be. But by the grace of God, we are not what we were. For as long as we are left here, we are to struggle against sin, and anticipate, so far as we are able, what it will be like to live in the untarnished bliss of perfect righteousness. We are to live with a view to the day of Christ.
D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 135-136.
God’s Purpose for You
God’s purpose for the men and women He redeems is not simply to have them believe certain truths but to transform them in a lifelong process that stretches toward heaven.
D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 190.
Worship: The Only Proper Response
Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because He is worthy, delightfully so.
Life Is Worship 