Reading Classics Together: The Discipline of Grace, Chapter 7

Obeying the Great Commandment

This week’s reading for Tim Challies Reading Classics Together program was the seventh chapter of Jerry Bridges’ book The Discipline of Grace. This chapter is about the great commandment, the command to love God with heart, soul and mind, and how to keep it. How is it that we can genuinely love God?

I’m going to focus on one point in this week’s reading: the place of the gospel in obeying this commandment to love God. Bridges writes,

Scripture … says, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our love to God can only be a response to His love for us. If I do not believe God loves me, I cannot love Him.

One of the things that can keep us from loving God is a guilty conscience. A tender conscience is a good thing when it makes us aware of our sins, but it can also

load us down with guilt, and when we are under that burden and sense of condemnation, it is difficult to love God or believe that He loves us.

This is where the gospel comes in.

[W]e must continually take those sins that our consciences accuse us of to the Cross and plead the cleansing blood of Jesus. It is only the blood of Christ that cleanses our consciences so that we may no longer feel guilty….

It’s only when we are free of the sense of guilt that we can love God with heart, soul, and mind. It’s then that

we are motivatied in a positive sense to love Him in this wholehearted way. Our love will be spontaneous in an ourpouring of gratitude to Him and fervent desire to obey Him.

It’s the gospel that provides us with the motive (the “only enduring motive”) to love God.

Next week’s reading is chapter 8, Dependent Discipline. 

On Our Extraordinary God at An Ordinary Blog

Today I posted on God’s aseity at Out of the Ordinary. Here’s an excerpt:

Aseity is an old word an uncommon one, even in lists of God’s attributes, where you’ll more often find self-existence, self-sufficiency, self-containment, independence, or solitariness used to describe this characteristic of God. But these words don’t all mean exactly the same thing, at least as I understand them. I prefer to to use aseity, because it describes this particular perfection of God more precisely than any one of the other words, and includes within it everything they mean and more. 

Aseity comes from the Latin a se, meaning “from or by oneself.” To say that God is a se tells us that he exists wholly “from himself.” There is nothing else that causes God to exist; rather, he exists uncaused, “by the necessity of His own Being,” to quote Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology. In other words, he is eternally self-sustained and he can’t not exist. Our God, scripture tells us, “has life in himself”(John 5:26). 

The first scriptural evidence of God’s aseity is found at the very beginning of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Creation, we’re told, has a beginning: “In the beginning” when God created. But not so with God. He was there before the beginning, when there was nothing but him, existing eternally in all his perfection from himself and by himself.

Read the whole post.

I plan to be back later with this week’s post on The Discipline of Grace. It should have been posted yesterday, but wasn’t, partly because of The Great Yukon-Wide Communications Black-Out of 2012 and partly because I was too busy. My internet connectivity has been spotty again this morning, so if you don’t see this post from me later today, that might be the reason. 

Thankful Thursday

I could not have asked for a better day, weatherwise. We’re right at the peak of our fall colors and the weather was clear and warm. I went cranberry picking this afternoon, and dug potatoes bare-footed this evening. In between, I had visits from the two grandbabies. 

I’m thankful for fall, for sun, and for warm. I’m thankful for potatoes in the garden and cranberries in the forest. I’m thankful items crossed off a long to-do list. I’m thankful for God’s help to finish a few big jobs.

Yesterday Natalie took her first step. Today, Amelia grabbed her feet for the first time. Two babies, so different: Natalie is a busy, busy little doer; Amelia loves to sit and watch and smile at the world. Two perfect little blessings to their parents and to me. I am thankful to our heavenly Father who gave each one to us.

I’m thankful for orchard run apples in bins at the supermarket.

I’m thankful for God’s goodness to me, for giving me all these temporal blessings. I’m thankful that the One who has life in himself gives me life, both physical and spiritual.