I once knew a good woman who was the subject of many doubts, and when I got to the bottom of her doubt, it was this: she knew she loved Christ, but she was afraid he did not love her. “Oh!” I said, “that is a doubt that will never trouble me; never, by any possibility, because I am sure of this, that the heart is so corrupt, naturally, that love to God never did get there without God’s putting it there.” You may rest quite certain, that if you love God, it is a fruit, and not a root. It is the fruit of God’s love to you, and did not get there by the force of any goodness in you. You may conclude, with absolute certainty, that God loves you if you love God.
How excellent is that?!?! If you love God, rest assured, it came from Him and you can therefore know that He loves you. Love is a fruit not a root!
Related to that, Dan Goldfinch quotes NT Wright from Simply Christian.
The key word, of course, is ‘love,’ and much has been written about that in itself. But I want to draw attention to something else–something often ignored in the clamor for better and clearer rules of Christian behavior: that we should be positively kind to one another. ‘Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us’ (Ephesians 4:32-5:2). The quest for justice all too easily degenerates into the demand for my rights or our rights. The command to kindness asks that we spend our time looking not at ourselves and our needs, our rights, our wrongs-that-need-righting, but at everyone else and their needs, pressures, pains, and joys. Kindness is the primary way of growing up as a human being, of establishing and maintaining the richest and deepest relationships.
Love is a fruit. We cannot force it. It can only truly come from a heart redeemed by God. In fact, it must come from a heart redeemed by God. And as such, kindness and other behavior indicative of that love will follow. Without this true love, one is left only with a social gospel. The activity may look the same but the value and true effect is worlds apart.
And as Wright describes, this kindness that flows from a heart of love looks like preferring others, sowing into their lives, and not always insisting on our right to be right.
Now what about "living the Gospel"? Like Darryl Dash, I cringe a little when I hear the phrase. Dash notes Graeme Goldsworthy's comment to confirm where that sense comes from:
If something is not what God did in and through the historical Jesus two thousand years ago, it is not the gospel...[Christians] can only believe it, proclaim it and seek to live consistently with it. Only Jesus lived (and died) the gospel. It is a once-for-all finished and perfect event done for us by another.
But as Dash points out, Glenn Kreider counters this well with the following.
Certainly the gospel (good news) is grounded in the work of Christ, but it would seem to include the future work of Christ as well (including His return and the new creation), as well as blessing for all believers (Gal. 3:8). Furthermore this limitation seems inconsistent with Goldworthy's definition of the gospel as "the event (or proclamation of that event) of Jesus Christ that begins with his incarnation and earthly life, and concludes with his death, resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Father" (p. 58). Would not the proclamation of the work of Christ be something that Christians do, and would not that proclamation include living the message as well? In short, how does one separate the verbal and incarnational ministry of the gospel? Did not Paul indicate that Christians do live the gospel when he wrote that "we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus" (2 Cor. 4:10 NIV)? It would seem that one way to understand Paul's testimony in Philippians 3:10-11 is as affirming his desire to live the gospel. "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow, to attain to the resurrection of the dead" (NIV). Also, Goldworthy's emphasis on the eschatological trajectory of the biblical story seems difficult to reconcile with the strong limitation of the work of Christ completed in the past. He writes, "God's plan from all creation was the new creation and a people created and redeemed in Christ. The blueprint of creation and of all history is the gospel"
Dash's conclusion is excellent! I'm with him on this.
One of our greatest needs is to keep our definitions of the Gospel centered on the work of God in Christ rather than our own works, but then to include all the work that God did through Christ as good news of what God has done and continues to do.
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