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”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Man. I just can't get my arms around the gospel. Know what I mean? Not that I can't understand it, or live in it. Every time I read/hear it so clearly, it stirs, convicts, compels me again. I understand more and more why we're told to remember & meditate on it. It just keeps working on/in me. But even as that happens, I also see 2 Cor.2:15-16 more clearly too.
Thats good stuff.
Hard to wrap my head around though. I wish I could see people like that. I wish I could extend God's offer of mercy like that. Something to work toward I suppose...looking at people that are totally unloveable and still loving them as Christ would...extending that offer of salvation....
And what a magnificent picture of the gospel. How great to apply that personally. To know that while i could never have calculated the cost of my sin, God has and will, and will still in the end credit me with righteousness instead. beautiful.
thanks
I think you have more than 5 readers. Think positive, dude.
Post a Comment