The Great Work of the Gospel

I know it’s been a while, but hey life is more than blogging. I have been trying to get into a new habit of reading two books a week. I am up to about one and half depending on length of the book and my schedule for that week.

I am about half way through a great book entitled “The Great Work of the Gospel” by John Ensor. I highly recommend it. I have been a Christian since I was 12 and have known that Jesus died for my sins since a small boy. It is only in the last few months at the age of 35 that I think I may actually be moving out of a kindergarten understanding of Christ’s death and resurrection.

I wanted to post an excerpt from the above book to get my 5 readers thinking about the Gospel in new ways.

Ensor tells a story about a guy in prison that he is interacting with. The guy is seriously jacked up. He was fatherless and his mom was an alcoholic. He was brash and cocky but with no future ahead of him. He ends up in jail for raping a girl. Ensor applies to this guy what he says through the whole book. People are wounded and wayward. He begins to reach out to this guy….

If not for the cross, I would not have known what to say…. I told him that God is a God of love, and therefore a God of mercy and forgiveness. But I told him first that God is a God of holiness, that he loves righteousness and is angry at him for the harm he had done. I assured him that God could show mercy to him, but not until he saw how wicked and evil his action was and how much he deserved to be punished.
I did not say, “Hey, God loves you, so let’s forget that you forced yourself on that young girl, and how much pain and terror you brought her.” I said, in effect, “If you agree with your accuser and admit that you did evil and deserve to be punished by God, and if you turn to Him who is rightly angry and ask Him for mercy, then you will find that He is able to forgive you. How so? Because God calculated the full amount of punishment needed to vindicate the young woman’s dignity, and He calculated the punishment needed to repair the glory of God defaced by your wickedness. Then He totaled it all up and inflicted the full punishment, in righteous anger, on Jesus Christ on the cross. And if you will entrust you life to the living Christ and obey Him, trusting that the cross is sufficient payment for your sins, God will credit it as your own and will redeem your life.” John Ensor p.99-100 “The Great Work of the Gospel”