I just finished reading Surprised by Grace by Tullian Tchividjian!
Here are several quotes that made the book well worth reading:
In seminary I had a professor who referred to the New Testament as the Bible’s footnotes. He meant no disrespect; he knew that the New Testament is just as inspired and trustworthy and infallible as the Old. He was simply saying in a different way what Augustine said centuries earlier-that the New Testament is contained in the Old, and the Old Testament is explained in the New.
God is more interested in the worker than he is in the work the worker does. He’s more interested in you than in what you can accomplish. If accomplishing Project Ninevah was all God cared about, he could have discarded Jonah and found a more reliable prophet. He knew Jonah would run; so why did he ask Jonah to go in the first place? It was because Jonah was God’s project. God comes after Jonah not because he needs Jonah, but because Jonah needs God.
But before we go to far in condemning Jonah’s self-righteousness, we need to be aware of another (prehaps more subtle) side to self-righteousness that “younger brother” types need to be careful of. There’s an equally dangerous form of self-righteousness that plaques the unconventional and the non-religious types. Anti-legalists can become just as guilty of legalism in the opposite direction. What do I mean? Those who are more like the younger brother -more irreligious-can easily take sinful pride in that fact.
Many younger evangelicals today are reacting to their parents’ conservative, buttoned-down, rule-keeping flavor of “older brother religion” with a type of liberal, untucked, rule-breaking flavor of “younger brother irreligion” It screams out, “That’s right! I know I don’t have it all together, and you think you do; I know I am not good, and you think you are. And that makes me better than you!” See the irony? We become self-righteous against the self-rightesous.
God is in the business of relentlessly pursuing rebels like us and that he comes after us not to angrily strip away our freedom but to affectionately strip away our slavery so we might become truly free.
We learn about the danger we experience when we run from God’s will, the deliverance we experience when we submit to God’s will, the deliverance others experience when we fulfill God’s will, and the depression we experience when we question God’s will.
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Continued here:
Surprised by Grace
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