People Do Not Drift Toward Holiness

by Josh Etter | May 15, 2011

Hard work is not the opposite of grace, it is the result of experiencing grace.

D. A. Carson explains:

People do not drift toward Holiness.

Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.

We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
(For the Love of God, Volum…

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Four Kinds of Freedom

by Josh Etter | April 29, 2011

John Piper from this week's sermon on John 8:30-36:

1) If you don't have the desire to do a thing, you are not fully free to do it. Oh, you may muster the will power to do what you don't want to do, but nobody calls that full freedom. It's not the way we want to live. There is a constraint and pressure on us that we don't want.

2) And if you have the desire to do something, but no ability to do it, you are not free to do it.

3) And if you have the desire and the ability to do something, but no opportunity to do it, you are not free to do it.

4) And if you have the desire to do something, and the ability to do it, and the opportunity to do it, but it destroys you in the end, you are not fu…

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God Has Two Hands

by Josh Etter | April 29, 2011

John Calvin comments on 1 Peter 5:5:

We are to imagine that; God has two hands; the one, which like a hammer beats down and breaks in pieces those who raise up themselves; and the other, which raises up the humble who willingly let down themselves, and is like a firm prop to sustain them. Were we really convinced of this, and had it deeply fixed in our minds, who of us would dare by pride to urge war with God?

Taken from Calvin's Commentaries.

In His Resurrection He Was Justified

by Josh Etter | April 24, 2011

Jonathan Edwards writes:

So Christ, our second surety (in whose justification all whose surety he is, are virtually justified), was not justified till he had done the work the Father had appointed him, and kept the Father’s commandments through all trials, and then in his resurrection he was justified. When he had been put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit, 1 Peter 3:18, then he that was manifest in the flesh was justified in the Spirit, 1 Timothy 3:16.

But God, when he justified him in raising him from the dead, did not only release him from his humiliation for sin, and acquit him from any further suffering or abasement for it, but admitted him to that eternal and immort…

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The Meaning of the Resurrection

by Josh Etter | April 24, 2011

Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes:

The Resurrection is the great announcement of the momentous fact that Christ has finished the work He came to do. He is no longer "under the law." He is back in glory. Why? Because He has done everything that the Law could demand. Now the Law has exhausted itself upon Him, and He will die "no more."

He need not have died at all. Deliberately He came into the realm of sin and death, in order to deliver us from it all. Now He "dies no more. Death has no more dominion over Him!"

That is the meaning of the Resurrection. He has gone back into the realm above and beyond sin and law and death. He has conquered that entire realm, and He has returned to the glory from wh…

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