How Do We Know If We Love Christ?

July 31, 2011 | by: Josh Etter | Category: Commentary

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/how-do-we-know-if-we-love-christ

 

J. C. Ryle writes:

1. If we love a person, we like to think about him. We do not need to be reminded of him. We do not forget his name or his appearance or his character or his opinions or his tastes or his position or his occupation... Well, it is just so between the true Christian and Christ!
2. If we love a person, we like to hear about him. We find a pleasure in listening to those who speak of him. We feel an interest in any report which others make of him... Well, it is just so between the true Christian and Christ!
3. If we love a person, we like to read about him. What intense pleasure a letter from an absent husband gives to a wife, or a letter from an absent son to his mother... Well, it is just so between the true Christian and Christ!
4. If we love a person, we like to please him. We are glad to consult his tastes and opinions, to act upon his advice and do the things which he approves... Well, it is just so between the true Christian and Christ!
5. If we love a person, we like his friends. We are favorably inclined to them, even before we know them. We are drawn to them by the common tie of common love to one and the same person... Well, it is just so between the true Christian and Christ!
6. If we love a person, we are jealous about his name and honor. We do not like to hear him spoken against, without speaking up for him and defending him... Well, it is just so between the true Christian and Christ!
7. If we love a person, we like to talk to him. We tell him all our thoughts, and pour out all our heart to him. We find no difficulty in discovering subjects of conversation... Well, it is just so between the true Christian and Christ!
8. Finally, if we love a person, we like to be always with him. Thinking and hearing and reading and occasionally talking are all well in their way. But when we really love people we want something more... Well, it is just so between the true Christian and Christ!

Holiness, (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press) 247-249.

God at Work by Ray Stedman

Read the Scripture: Genesis 3:20-24

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them (Genesis 3:21).

Here is the beginning of animal sacrifices: God sheds blood in order to make clothing for Adam and Eve. He made them from the skins of animals, and therefore those animal lives were sacrificed to clothe Adam and Eve. This is but a picture, as all animal sacrifices are but pictures—a kind of kindergarten of grace—in order to teach us the great truth that God eternally attempts to communicate to us as men and women. Ultimately, it is God Himself who bears the pain, the hurt, and agony of our sins. As John the Baptist said, Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away [who is continually taking away] the sin of the world! (John 1:29). Paul uses a wonderful phrase in Ephesians: accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6 KJV). When we have acknowledged our guilt, when we have acknowledged that what we have done is contrary to what God wants, and we stand there with nothing to defend ourselves and no attempt to do so, but simply in honest acknowledgment of our own doing, then we are accepted in the beloved.
In our area where I grew up in Montana, we had many sheep farms. Spring was the lambing season when the little lambs were born. But spring in Montana is not like it is in California. Sleet storms can come whirling down out of the north, and snow can still be three or four feet deep on the prairies. Often there are long, protracted seasons of bitter cold during lambing season. When the sheep must bear lambs in that kind of weather, many of the lambs and ewes die. As a result, sheep farmers have many mothers whose newborn lambs have died and many newborn lambs whose mothers have died. It would seem that a simple way to solve the problem would be to take the lambs without mothers and give them to the mothers without lambs, but it is not that simple. If you take a little orphan lamb and put it in with a mother ewe, she will immediately go to it and sniff it all over, and then she shakes her head as though to say, Well, that's not our family odor, and she butts it away and refuses to have anything to do with it. But the sheep farmers have devised a means of solving this. They take the mother's own little dead lamb and skin it and take the skin and tie it onto the other little orphan lamb. Then they put the orphan lamb with this ungainly skin flopping around—eight legs, two heads—in with the mother. She pays no attention at all to the way it looks, but she sniffs it all over again, and then she nods her head. The little lamb goes to work at the milk fountain, and all is well.
What has happened? The orphan lamb has been accepted in the beloved one. There came a time when God's Lamb lay dead on our behalf, and God took us orphans and clothed us in His righteousness, and thus we stand accepted in the beloved, received in His place. That is where repentance brings us. That is the way you begin the Christian life. But if you think that is where it ends, you are wrong. We must be continually repenting of those areas where we fail or fall back upon a way of living that God has said is not right. I must repent of my self-dependence—and so must you.

Teach me, Lord, to continually repent. Thank you for clothing me in the righteousness of Jesus, that I may be accepted in the beloved

Life Application: Repentance not only begins the Christian life, but is the daily basis upon which the whole Christian life is built. How are we at daily confessing our self-dependence?

From your friends at

www.RayStedman.org

Preaching Christ from the Old Testament

Panel on Preaching Christ in the OT - Keller, Piper, Loritts, Carson, Chapell - TGC 2011 from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

Isaiah 55 ESV

Isaiah 55

The Compassion of the LORD

 ^1(A) "Come, everyone who thirsts,
   come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
   ^(B) come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
   without money and without price.
^2(C) Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
   and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
   and delight yourselves in rich food.
³Incline your ear, and come to me;
   ^(D) hear, that your soul may live;
^(E) and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
   ^(F) my steadfast, sure love for^(G) David.
^4(H) Behold, I made him a witness to the peoples,
   ^(I) a leader and commander for the peoples.
^5(J) Behold, you shall call a nation that you do not know,
   and^(K) a nation that did not know you shall run to you,
because of the LORD your God, and of the Holy One of Israel,
   ^(L) for he has glorified you. ^6(M) "Seek the LORD while he may be found;
   call upon him while he is near;
⁷let the wicked forsake his way,
   and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him,
   and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
⁸For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
   neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
^9(N) For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
   so are my ways higher than your ways
   and my thoughts than your thoughts.
 ^10(O) "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
   and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
   ^(P) giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
¹¹so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
   it shall not return to me empty,
but^(Q) it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
   and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
 ^12(R) "For you shall go out in joy
   and be led forth in peace;
^(S) the mountains and the hills before you
   shall break forth into singing,
   and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
^13(T) Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
   instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall make a name for the LORD,
   an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off."

Erasing Hell by Francis Chan

Elements of Joy Part 1 (Excerpt) John MacArthur

There's a man named George Raindrop, an interesting name. Wrote a book called "No Common Task." It's got one beautiful incident in it that I want to relate it to you. In the book he tells about a nurse and how this nurse taught a man to pray and literally changed the man's entire life. The story says he was a dull disgruntled disspirited man who became a man of joy. This is what the writer says, "Much of the nurse's work was done with her hands. And she used her hand as, as it were, a scheme of prayer. Each of her fingers stood for someone. Her thumb was nearest to her and it reminded her to pray for those who were nearest and closest and dearest to her. The second finger was used for pointing, those who teach us point to us with it when they would ask us a question. Therefore her second finger stood for all her teachers, she prayed for them. The third finger is the tallest and it stood for the VIPs, the leaders in every sphere of life. The fourth finger is the weakest, as every pianist knows, and it stood for those who were weak and in trouble and in pain. And the little finger is the smallest and the most unimportant and to the nurse it stood for herself."
That's a lovely scheme of prayer. And there will always be a deep sense of joy in the heart of one who learns to pray by that little scheme. Starting with others and ending up with the most insignificant of all, yourself. That's the joy of intercession, the joy of petition.
Excerpt from  http://www.gty.org/Resources/Sermons/50-2_Elements-of-Joy-Part-1
 

Character- Blessed are those Who Mourn

http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/c/character.htm
Will Rogers was known for his laughter, but he also knew how to weep. One day he was entertaining at the Milton H. Berry Institute in Los Angeles, a hospital that specialized in rehabilitating polio victims and people with broken backs and other extreme physical handicaps. Of course, Rogers had everybody laughing, even patients in really bad condition; but then he suddenly left the platform and went to the rest room. Milton Berry followed him to give him a towel; and when he opened the door, he saw Will Rogers leaning against the wall, sobbing like a child. He closed the door, and in a few minutes, Rogers appeared back on the platform, as jovial as before.
If you want to learn what a person is really like, ask three questions: What makes him laugh? What makes him angry? What makes him weep? These are fairly good tests of character that are especially appropriate for Christian leaders. I hear people saying, "We need angry leaders today!" or "The time has come to practice militant Christianity!" Perhaps, but "the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God" (James 1:20).
What we need today is not anger but anguish, the kind of anguish that Moses displayed when he broke the two tablets of the law and then climbed the mountain to intercede for his people, or that Jesus displayed when He cleansed the temple and then wept over the city. The difference between anger and anguish is a broken heart. It's easy to get angry, especially at somebody else's sins; but it's not easy to look at sin, our own included, and weep over it.

Faint Not by Jenny and Tyler

"where there is hatred, let me sow love
where there is injury, let me pardon
where there is darkness, let the Light come, come
o my soul, faint not, no
faint not o my soul, keep up, up
in love
faint not
faint not"

Ishmael Must Go! Sermon Ray Stedman

http://www.raystedman.org/old-testament/genesis/ishmael-must-go
Read the Scripture: Genesis 21:1-14

Gravity and Gladness on Sunday Morning, Part 1

Gravity and Gladness on Sunday Morning, Part 1

The Inner Essence of Worship

The Inner Essence of Worship

Pastor John from 2008:

The essential, vital, indispensable, defining heart of worship is the experience of being satisfied with God. This satisfaction in God magnifies God in the heart. This explains why the apostle Paul makes so little distinction between worship as a congregational service and worship as a pattern of daily life. They have the same root – a passion for treasuring God as infinitely valuable. The impulse for singing a hymn and the impulse for visiting a prisoner is the same: a thirst for God – a desire to experience as much satisfaction in God as we can.

Excerpted from Gravity and Gladness on Sunday Morning, Part 1.