Thursday, February 22, 2018

A GREAT Little Book

I am doing a slew of speaking this spring.  In preparation for some of it, my daughter Kelly has loaned me several books. Because I am in the middle of two other books already, I asked her which was her top couple.  She named them, one of which was Supernatural Living for Natural People, by Ray Ortlund Jr.  This is an excellent study of Romans 8.  I highly recommend, it.  He gets to the point and all 39 verses are covered in only 143 short pages with study questions at the end of each chapter.

I am writing down several quotes that I will use, hopefully, for the next several years. The topics of Romans 8, are living as a disciple, and the work of the Holy Spirit.  I will be speaking on both these topics, so that may explain why I like the book so much.

Another reason I like the book is that these two topics:  the Holy Spirit and Discipleship, are mostly under-considered in US evangelical Christianity.  I have speculated before about the influence of capitalism on Christianity in the USA.  We like to count things, and once you are baptized, there isn't too much to count.  And, I am an ardent capitalist!

It is sad to me, that we seem to have so many Christians in the USA who have bought a spiritual "life insurance policy". We have sold the idea of grace, which is undeniably the only true means of salvation, so strongly that most of us Christians seem to want to live our lives primarily in the flesh with a trip to church at Christmas and Easter, and maybe a bit more.  After all, we know we are saved.

But, Ortlund explains that this is a wholly inadequate. G^d has paid a very high price for you and for me. How should we then respond? 

Here is an Ortlund quote (pg. 37) that seems to capture some of this, "The love of the world, and the love of G^d are like the scales of a balance; as the one falleth, the other doth rise." (from The Life of God in the Soul of Man, by Henry Scougal, who taught at Aberdeen Uni in the 1600s).  Practical yet profound, eh?

Rather than write more, let's just meditate on that quote for a while...

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