Saturday, November 29, 2014

Quoting Martyn Lloyd-Jones #11

One of the devotionals I am using this year is Walking with God Day by Day by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I thought I would share some of my favorite passages month by month. (January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October).
From November 10
“God is love.” No one can answer against that; one trembles even to handle it; it cannot be analyzed. I simply want to point out that John does not say merely that God loves us or that God is loving. He goes beyond that. He says, “God is love.” God essentially is love; God’s nature is love; you cannot think of God without love. Of course he has already told us that God is light in exactly the same way—that was the first pronouncement. “This then is the message... God is light” (1 John 1:5); and in exactly the same way “God is love” and God is spirit. This battles the imagination; it is something that is altogether beyond our comprehension, and yet we start with it. Augustine and others deduce from this the doctrine of the Trinity. I think there may be a great deal in that; the very fact that God is love declares the Trinity—God the Father loves the Son, and the link is the person of the Holy Spirit. Ah! this high doctrine; it is beyond us. All I know is that God, in the very essence of His nature and being, is love, and you cannot think of God and must not think of Him except in terms of love. Everything that God is and does is colored by this; all God’s actions have this aspect of love in them and the aspect of light in the same way. That is how God always manifests Himself—light and love. “Therefore, because that is the fundamental postulate, because that is so true of God,” John is saying, “that works itself out for us like this: Because God is love, we ought to love one another. For ‘love is of God.’” In other words, love is from God, love flows from God. It is as if John were turning to these people and saying, “God loves, and this love I am talking about is something that only comes from God—it is derived from Him.”
From November 11
The more I study the New Testament and live the Christian life, the more convinced I am that our fundamental difficulty, our fundamental lack, is the lack of seeing the love of God. It is not so much our knowledge that is defective but our vision of the love of God. Thus our greatest object and endeavor should be to know Him better, and thus we will love Him more truly.
From November 25
We are all guilty before God and before His holy law. We are guilty in His presence; so the first thing I need is to be saved from the guilt of my sin. I need a Savior in that respect apart from anything else. I have broken the law of God, and I am under the condemnation of that holy law; so before I can talk about salvation or about being saved, I must be perfectly clear that I am delivered from the guilt of my sin. That is the glorious message that the New Testament Gospel brings to me. In Christ my guilt is removed. It is no use my facing the future and proposing to live a better life. I am confronted by my own past—I cannot avoid it, I cannot escape it. I have broken the law—I must deal with the problem of my guilt—and I cannot do so. I cannot undo my past; I cannot make atonement for my misdeeds and for everything I have done against God. I must be delivered from the guilt of my sin, and Christ—and Christ alone—can so deliver me. But having thus had the assurance that the guilt of my sin has been dealt with, I am still confronted by the power of sin. I battle the world and the flesh and the devil; forces and factors outside me are trying to drag me down, and I am aware of their terrible power. The man or woman who has not realized the power of sin all around him or her is a novice in these matters. There is only One who has conquered Satan, there is only One who has defeated the world, and that is this Son whom the Father sent into the world to be our Savior. Jesus Christ can deliver me from the power of sin as well as from the guilt of sin.
© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

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