“It is a not uncommon instinct among contemporary Christians to encounter difficulties and immediately conclude they have fallen into divine disfavor… We are not the best interpreters of divine providence. Nor is our conviction of the Father’s love for us grounded in his providential ways with us. The fatal mistake here is to base our assurance of grace and salvation on the fact that ‘God is blessing my life.’ When we do so, we have no anchor when life turns…
“Here is the heart of the plan of God and the wonder of the gospel. The best of all men dies as though He were the worst of all criminals… God can point us to the cross and say: ‘Do you see how much I love you?’ ‘I was prepared to bear My own judgment against your sin in the person of My own Son.’ ‘If I was prepared to do that for you, there is nothing I will withhold from…
“You cannot rely on your experiences to prove the love of God. They may indeed give you evidences of it. But when you are in the dark, those very things may seem to mock you. There is one place you can go…There is no other evidence or argument that can be brought in all the dark providences of human experience that can withstand the mighty logic of the evidence of Calvary. If God has said, ‘I love you so much…
“You cannot rely on your experiences to prove the love of God. They may indeed give you evidences of it. But when you are in the dark, those very things may seem to mock you. There is one place you can go…There is no other evidence or argument that can be brought in all the dark providences of human experience that can withstand the mighty logic of the evidence of Calvary. If God has said, ‘I love you so much…
“A visitor to the contemporary church materializing from an earlier century would probably be struck by how enormously privileged we are. We each own a Bible; if they owned a Bible it was in small print Elizabethan English. We carry entire theological libraries on our eReaders, have access to vast resources via the worldwide web; they perhaps owned one or two Christian books. And yet, if the truth be told, what might surprise the most is that their familiarity with…