Tag Archives: Christ
The Disgrace of Need
Let us not suppose that we bring anything to the Lord but the sheer disgrace of need and emptiness.
Christ Is Lord of All
There is no sphere, however secular, in which Christ has no rights — and no sphere in which His servants are absolved from obedience to Him.
B. M. Metzger in J. Oswald Sanders, The Incomparable Christ, p. 228
The Preacher’s Task and the Stone of Stumbling
The preacher’s task is to leave that stone in their path. Never mind if they pick it up, look at it, and throw it away: they cannot keep on throwing it away forever. It is the cornerstone of their lives and finally they must reckon with it. The only obedience that God asks of the preacher is that he does not attempt to change the shape of that stone in order to make it fit more easily into some other place in the building. That stone is meant for judgment as well as for fulfillment. It is uncut by human hand. The preacher is as bound by its nature and its function as are those to whom he preaches. Jesus Christ is both the preacher’s message and his limitation.
D. T. Niles, The Preachers’ Task and the Stone of Stumbling, p. 15
Sharing the Love of Christ with Each Other
What is perhaps most striking about God’s love, and what is certainly most pertinent to our understanding of the church, is that the Lord wants to share his love with us, not only by making us the objects of that love but also by equipping us to share that love with others. By creating us in his image, he has fitted us to reproduce the inter-relational love of the Trinitarian family, passing back and forth among members of our families the love that reverberates within the holy Godhead.
The Trinity in Worship
Worship is the gift of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father.
Whom Am I?
By becoming a Christian, I belong to God and I belong to my brothers and sisters. It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church. My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ. This is my identity. This is our identity. If the church is the body of Christ, then we should not live as disembodied Christians.
Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 41
The Purpose of Our Relationship with Christ
The purpose of our relationship with God in Christ is the perfecting of the relationship itself.
Increasing in Christ
Our faith should and will be an ever-increasing fruition of Christ, accompanied with increasing perception of unreached depths in Him, and increasing longing after enlarged possession of His infinite fullness.
Alexander Maclaren, The Epistles of St. Paul to the Colossians and Philemon, p. 437
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Life Is Worship 