Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avante-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think. Pages 15, 16
To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right. Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for the very roots of their righteousness, too. We must learn how to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness – the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord. We must admit that we’ve put our ultimate hope and trust in things other than God, and that in both our wrongdoing and right doing we have been seeking to get around God or get control of God in order to get hold of other things.
It is only when you see the desire to be your own Savior and Lord – lying beneath both your sins and your moral goodness – that you are on the verge of understanding the gospel and becoming a Christian indeed. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink. If you follow through, it will change everything: how you relate to God, self, others, the world, your work, your sins, your virtue. It’s called the new birth because it’s so radical. Pages 77, 78
The younger son gets a Pharisee for a brother instead.
But we do not.
By putting a flawed elder brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to imagine and yearn for a true one.
And we have him. Think of the kind of brother we need. We need one who does not just go to the next country to find us but who will come all the way from heaven to earth. We need one who is willing to pay not just a finite amount of money, but, at the infinite cost of his own life to bring us into God;s family, for our debt is so much greater. Either as elder brothers or as younger brothers we have rebelled against the father. We deserve alienation, isolation, and rejection. The point of the parable is that forgiveness always involves a price – someone has to pay. There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself. Our true elder paid our debt, on the cross, in our place.
There Jesus was stripped naked of his robe and dignity so that we could be clothed with a dignity and standing we don’t deserve. On the cross Jesus was treated as an outcast so that we could be brought into God’s family freely by grace. There Jesus drank the cup of eternal justice so that we might have the cup of the Father’s joy. There was no other way for the heavenly Father to bring us in, except at the expense of our true elder brother. Pages 84, 85
How can the inner workings of the heart be changed from a dynamic of fear and anger to that of love, joy, and gratitude? Here is how. You need to be moved by the sight of what it cost to bring you home. The key difference between a Pharisee and a believer in Jesus is the inner-heart motivation. Pharisees are bring good but out of a fear-fueled need to control God. They don’t really trust him or love him. To them God is an exacting boss, not a loving father. Christians have seen something that has transformed their hearts toward God so they can finally love and rest in the Father. Pages 85, 86
Jesus’s salvation is a feast, and therefore when we believe in and rest in his work for us, through the Holy Spirit he becomes real to our hearts. His love is like honey, or like wine. Rather than only believing he is loving, we can come to sense the reality, the beauty, and power of his love. His love can become more real to you than the love of anyone else. It can delight, galvanize, and console you. That will lift you up and free you from fear like nothing else.
This makes all the difference. If you are filled with shame and guilt, you do not merely need to believe in the abstract concept of God’s mercy. You must sense, on the palate of the heart, as it were, the sweetness of his mercy. Then you will know you are accepted. If you are filled with worry and anxiety, you do not only need to believe that God is in control of history. You must see, with the eyes of the heart, his dazzling majesty. Then you will know he has things in hand. Pages 108, 109
Jesus had not come to simply deliver one nation from political oppression, but to save all of us from sin, evil, and death itself. He came to bring the human race Home. Therefore he did not come in strength but in weakness. He came and experienced the exile that we deserved. He was expelled from the presence of the Father, he was thrust into the darkness, the uttermost despair of spiritual alienation – in our place. He took upon himself the full curse of human rebellion, cosmic homelessness, so that we could be welcomed into our true home. Pages 101, 102
The book of Genesis tells us that when God made this world he looked upon the physical creation and called it ‘good.’ He loves and cares for the material world. The fact of Jesus’s resurrection and the promise of a new heavens and new earth show clearly that he still cares for it. This world is not simply a theater for individual conversion narratives, to be discarded at the end when we all go to heaven. No, the ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering, and death. The climax of history is not a higher form of disembodied consciousness but a feast. God made the world with all its colors, tastes, lights, sounds, with all its life-forms living in interdependent systems. It is now marred, stained, and broken, and he will not rest until he has put it right. Pages 110, 111
Christianity, therefore, is perhaps the most materialistic of the world’s faiths. Jesus’s miracles were not so much violations of the natural order, but a restoration of the natural order. God did not create a world with blindness, leprosy, hunger, and death in it. Jesus’s miracles were signs that someday all these corruptions of his creation would be abolished. Christians therefore can talk of saving the soul and of building social systems that deliver safe streets amd warm homes in the same sentence. With integrity.
Jesus hates suffering, injustice, evil, and death so much, he came and experienced it to defeat it and, someday, to wipe the world clean of it. Knowing all this, Christians cannot be passive about hunger, sickness, and injustice. Karl Marx and others have charged that religion is ‘the opiate of the masses.’ That is, it is a sedative that makes people passive toward injustice, because there will be ‘pie in the sky bye and bye.’ That may be true of some religions that teach people that this material world is unimportant or illusory. Christianity, however, teaches that God hates the suffering and oppression of this material world so much, he was willing to get involved in it and to fight against it. Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts. Pages 112, 113
Religion operates on the principle of ‘I obey – therefore I am accepted by God.’ The basic operating principle of the gospel is ‘I am accepted by God through the word of Jesus Christ – therefore I obey.’… We must not think, however, that once believing it, the Christian is now finished with the gospel message. A fundamental insight of Martin Luther’s was that ‘religion’ is the default mode of the human heart. Your computer operates automatically in a default mode unless you deliberately tell it to do something else. So Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel your heart will go back to operating on other principles unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode.
We habitually and instinctively look to other things besides God and his grace as our justification, hope, significance, and security. We believe the gospel at one level, but a deeper levels we do not. Human approval, professional success, power and influence, family and clan identity – all of these things serve as our heart’s ‘functional trust’ rather than what Christ has done, and as a result we continue to be driven to a great degree by fear, anger, and a lack of self-control. You cannot change such things through mere willpower, through learning Biblical principles and trying to carry them out. We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting ans making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow. Pages 114, 115
The Gospel is therefore not just the ABC’s of the Christian life, but the A to Z of the Christian life. Our problems arise largely because we don’t continually return to the gospel to work in it and live it out. That is why Martin Luther wrote, ‘The truth of the Gospel is the principle article of all Christian doctrine… Most necessary is it that we know this article well, teach it to others, and beat it into their heads continually.’ Page 119
Some years ago I met a woman who began coming to Redeemer, the church where I am a minister. She said that she had gone to a church growing up and she had always heard that God accepts us only if we are sufficiently good and ethical. She had never heard the message she was now hearing, that we can be accepted by God by sheer grace through the work of Christ regardless of anything we do or have done. She said, ‘That is a scary idea! Oh, it’s good scary, but still scary.’
I was intrigued. I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: ‘If I was saved by my good works – then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace – at God’s infinite cost – then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.’ Pages 120, 121
These quotations are from this paperback edition
Battling unbelief and fighting for faith in future grace means that we fight fire with fire. We throw against the promises of sin the promises of God. We take hold of some great promise God made about our future and say to a particular sin, ‘Match that!’ In this way we do what Paul says in Romans 8:13, ‘By the Spirit… put to death the deeds of the body.’ John Owen wrote a book on that verse and summed it up with, ‘Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.’ Page 16
Trusting God and being arrogant are opposites: ‘An arrogant man stirs up strife, but he who trusts in the Lord will prosper’ (Proverbs 28:25, NASB). That’s why Stephen Charnock said, ‘A proud faith is as much a contradiction as a humble devil.’ Page 38
… the heart of the biblical faith is coming to him for the satisfaction of all that God is for us in him [Jesus]. Page 38
Belief is not merely an agreement with the facts in the head; it is also an appetite for God in the heart, which fastens on Jesus for satisfaction. Page 39
Every turning from God – for anything – presumes a kind of autonomy or independence that is the essence of pride. Turning from God assumes that one knows better than God. Thus pride lies at the root of every turning from God. It is the root of every act of distrust toward God. Page 40
The itch of self-regard craves the scratch of self-approval. That is, if we are getting our pleasure from feeling self-sufficient, we will not be satisfied without others’ seeing and applauding our self-sufficiency. Hence Jesus’ description of the scribes and Pharisees: ‘They do all their deeds to be seen by others… [A]nd they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others’ (Matthew 23:507). Page 49
The key to patience is faith in the future grace of God’s ‘glorious might’ to transform all our interruptions into rewards.
In other words, the strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours. This requires great faith in future grace, because the evidence is seldom evident. Page 75
If you hold a grudge, you doubt the Judge. Page 110
Lloyd-Jones believes this issue of preaching truth to ourselves about God’s future grace is all-important in overcoming spiritual depression.
“I say that we must talk to ourselves instead of allowing ‘ourselves’ to talk to us! Do you realize what that means? I suggest that the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now [the psalmist's] treatment was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you… Why art thou cast down? – what business have you to be disquieted?’… And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who he is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance.’” Pages 126, 127
The final lesson of Gethsemane and Calvary and the book of the Psalms is that all the dark caves of despondency are really tunnels leading to the fields of joy – for those who don’t sit down in the dark and blow out the candle of faith in future grace. Page 131
If you die as a non-Christian, this life will be as close to heaven as you will ever experience, and nothing but hell awaits you. But if you die as a Christian, this life will be as close to hel as you will ever experience, and nothing but heaven awaits you. This is why Paul says to Christians in Philippians 1:21 that “to die is gain.” Page 193
A quote that I often return to on this point [suffering] is from an American missionary to India named E. Stanley Jones. He said, “Don’t bear trouble, use it. Take whatever happens – justice and injustice, pleasure and pain, compliment and criticism – take it up into the purpose of your life and make something out of it. Turn it into testimony.” Page 206
The false teaching of American Christianity Lite is that comfort is a virtue and pain a vice. As Christians we neither run to suffering as the early Christian ascetics did, nor run from it as modern Christian Americans do. Instead, we receive suffering when it comes as an opportunity for God to do something good in us and through us. We rejoice not in the pain, but rather in what it can accomplish for the gospel. Page 206
At the cross of Jesus we learn that we will suffer at the hands of those we love most, like Jesus did. In particular, Jesus suffered most for his bride, the church. Page 207
In conclusion, the Spirit-filled perspective of Jesus allows us to remain Jesus-centered in our thinking, Spirit-led in our practice, and humble in our hardships. This is made possible when we realize that because being Spirit-filled means being like Jesus, such things as poverty, sickness, and hardships are not incompatible with living a Spirit-filled life. Indeed, the most perfectly Spirit-filled person who has ever lived, Jesus Christ, worked a simple job, lived a simple life, and died a painful death as a flat-broke, homeless man by the power of the Holy Spirit and in so doing perfectly and fully glorified God the Father and tasted pure joy. Page 211
In closing, I leave you with a quote from a Romanian pastor who suffered under Communist rule, which I have committed to memory for seasons of suffering: “Christians are like nails; the harder you hit them, the deeper they go.” Page 211
