Beloved

a friend of mine recently called me an approval-whore. :)

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Reading: The Discipline of Grace, by Jerry Bridges.

There's a chapter called "Preach the Gospel to yourself". It talks about how many believers have only a rudimentary understanding of the good news of Jesus Christ - sufficient to get them into the church, whereupon they begin an endless series of discipleship courses and stuff like that. He says that there is a general fallacy within the church that the gospel is meant to be preached to unbelievers, not believers. After all, the believers have heard it all already, right?

It's kinda similar to a previous complaint I had about how we preach good news to unbelievers, but fail to make known to them the depth of commitment and change that comes with a life in Christ. Here the situation is reversed, somewhat, whereby we emphasise discipleship and the disciplines of faith to the body of believers, but fail to remind them of the gospel by which they came to know God.

But the author encourages us to remind ourselves daily of the good news of Christ - that though we are by very nature incorrigibly sinful, Christ has fully paid the price of our sins, so that we are not merely pardoned, but justified before God. This is the full gospel of Jesus, which will keep us from regarding our "godliness" with pride, yet also keeps us from despairing of our sinfulness.

To quote, "we must measure ourselves against God's perfect standard and daily confess that we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."

This seems very hard to me. We love to think of ourselves as "doing alright", but alright isn't good enough. It seems that this author is calling us daily to tear down whatever self-esteem we may have, pulling it into rubble, and remembering that our worth, value, and righteousness is found in Jesus. Then we may relate rightly with God and each other...