Recommended for Listening XI

D. A. Carson spoke recently at Omaha Bible Church on the topic of suffering. As usual with Don Carson, all of the sessions are excellent, but one is a sermon I don’t think I’d heard before, and fit its my monthly theme perfectly, so I’ll point you to that one in particular. It is Gospel Reflections on Trials and Tribulations on James 1:12-25.

Here’s a bit of what you’ll hear Carson say:

What James says is this: This gospel, this word of truth, saved you. Now, don’t just be hearers of it, live in it, live under it … because this gospel, written to Christians, is still able to save you. It’s this message of the gospel that comes to you and still transforms you and saved you and teaches you that you are accepted before God because of Jesus, not because you’ve led a superb Bible study. You are accepted in the beloved because of what Christ has done, not because you attended yet one more prayer meeting. It’s not that there’s no place for obedience. Of course there’s a place for obedience, but if it’s just more obedience and nothing else, then you become just one more of the next-door Pharisees. No, no, no, Christian life is lived out in gratitude to God for his grace. There’s a freedom in the gospel. This is the perfect law of freedom. There’s a freedom so that—yes, yes, yes, we learn to serve, and we pursue excellence—but it is in a matrix of gratitude to God for all he has done… We live our lives out of a thankful response to grace.

I’ve previously—and more than once—recommended another of Carson’s gospel-themed message, his What is the Gospel? sermon/lecture. If you have never listened to that one, you must. If your ears are tired, you can just read the whole transcript.

The Glorious Spectacle of All Things Done

Faith adds nothing to the cross, nor to its healing virtue.  It owns the fullness, and sufficiency, and suitableness of the work done there, and bids the toiling spirit cease from its labors and enter into rest.  Faith does not come to Calvary to do anything.  It comes to see the glorious spectacle of all things done, and to accept this completion without a misgiving as to its efficacy.  It listens to the “It is finished!” of the Sin-bearer, and says, “Amen.”  Where faith begins, there labor ends,—labor, I mean, for life and pardon. Faith is rest, not toil.  It is the giving up all the former weary efforts to do or feel something good, in order to induce God to love and pardon; and the calm reception of the truth so long rejected, that God is not waiting for any such inducements, but loves and pardons of His own goodwill, and is showing that good will to any sinner who will come to Him on such a footing, casting away his own performances or goodnesses, and relying implicitly upon the free love of Him who so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son.  

—Horatius Bonar in The Everlasting Righteousness

My Desktop Photo 30: Across the Narrows

Photo by Andrew Stark
(click for larger view)

Looking south across the narrows in the village of Carcross, Yukon. This photo was taken in October a couple of years ago.