Sunday’s sermon was the second part in our “Bookends of the Christian Life” series, inspired by the book of the same title by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington.

It was preached by Peter Bowley and was entitled: “Gospel Enemy#1 – Self-Righteousness“ from Luke 18:9-14.  You can listen to or download the audio file from here, or via our iTunes podcast feed.

During the message Peter shared some applications questions, taken from the Bridges/Bevington book, to help us identify self-righteousness in our own lives:

1. Do you tend to live by dos and don’ts?

2. Is it difficult for you to respect those whose standards aren’t as high as yours?

3. Do you assume that practicing the spiritual disciplines should result in God’s blessing?

4. Do you feel better than most people?

5. Has it been a long time since you identified a sin and repented of it?

6. Do you resent it when others point out your ‘spiritual blind spots’?

7. Do you readily recognise the sins of others but not your own?

8. Do you have the sense that God owes you a good life?

9. Do you get angry when difficulties and suffering come into your life?

10. Do you seldom think of the cross?

Sunday’s sermon was the second part in our “Bookends of the Christian Life” series, inspired by the book of the same title by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington.

It was preached by Peter Bowley and was entitled: “Gospel Enemy#1 – Self-Righteousness “ from Luke 18:9-14.  You can listen to or download the audio file from here, or via our iTunes podcast feed.

Here’s the quotes Peter used, including the “application prayer” from J.D Greear. The applications questions he supplied, taken from the Bridges/Bevington book, to help us identify self-righteousness in our own lives, will follow in a separate post later.

John Piper:
“All the gospels want us to know from the very beginning how the story ends. It ends with Jesus dying as a Lamb for the forgiveness of sins and rising again as Lord of the universe. That is the way to understand every paragraph in the Gospels. Jesus commandments are not mere snippets of wisdom for how to raise your family, or how to prosper in business, or how to feel good about yourself. They are descriptions of how new human beings live who have been born again by God’s Spirit, and have seen the glory of his Son, Jesus Christ, and have recognised the desperate condition of sin they are in, and have ceased to trust in anything about themselves at all for acceptance to God, and have turned wholly to Jesus and all that God has done for us in him, and all God is for us in him. If the Gospels have not had that effect on you yet, you will probably misuse all the commandments of Jesus.”

John Owen:
“When we have our quiet times for the day, or when we have given a tithe, we are confident of God’s love toward us. But when our days become crowded and personal devotions end up neglected, we start to avoid God, sensing that we are under his wrath and anger. We imagine that God is waiting for us to get ourselves together before we again enter his presence. Such thinking betrays our failure to grasp the security of our union with Christ and the depth of God’s love and consequently disrupts our communion with him. Making God’s love contingent on our action is a sad but common misunderstanding in the church. Remember a believer’s union is never in jeopardy. The wrath of God against the the sin of saints was completely exhausted on the cross.”

J. D. Greear:
“About four years ago, I wrote a prayer for our church to help to this end. We often talk about “preaching the gospel to ourselves daily,” but how can you do that? This four-part prayer confronts us with the reality of God’s gift-righteousness and love:

1.  “In Christ, there is nothing I could do that would make you love me more, and nothing I have done that makes you love me less.”

• Pray about this “gift righteousness” of the gospel (2 Cor. 5:21) and go to war against the incipient works-righteousness hardwired into our hearts.

2.  “Your presence and approval are all I need today for everlasting joy.”

• Pray about this value of God’s presence in our lives. It’s one thing to know that Jesus is your possession; it’s another for that approval to have such weightiness in our hearts that our captivity to other idols is snapped.

3.  “As you have been to me, so I will be to others.”

• Pray about and consider the extravagant generosity of God toward us. His generosity toward us leads us to radical generosity toward others.

4.  “As I pray, I’ll measure your compassion by the cross and your power by the resurrection.”

• Pray that God would help you view the world through the lens of the gospel. Seeing the compassion and power of God revealed in the gospel produces bold, audacious faith in our hearts.

Here’s the quotes that Matt used in his sermon yesterday entitled, “Get Wisdom“.  You can get the audio here.

John Piper:
“It is precisely by saturating our minds and hearts with God’s word that we gain the spiritual wisdom to guide us in all situations.”

Donald Whitney:
“What if I offered you one thousand dollars for every verse you could memorise in the next seven days? Do you think your attitude toward Scripture memory and your ability to memorise would improve? Any financial reward would be minimal when compared to the accumulating value of the treasure of God’s Word deposited within your mind.”

For parents, in light of Matt’s excellent message yesterday, this looks like it could be a very useful book for teaching wisdom to your children.

Get Wisdom: 23 Lessons for Children about Living for Jesus — Ruth Younts

Here’s Paul Tripp’s endorsement of this book:

“Ruth Younts has produced a wisdom character manual like I have never seen before.  Forget that it was written for children, I need it!

I wish I had been given such a fun, street-level and Christ-centered tool when my children were still at home.

By the way, Ruth isn’t able to talk about wisdom with such practicality and grace because she did graduate work in wisdom. No, Ruth has spent years at the feet of her Heavenly Father listening. She knows that he is not only the source of all true wisdom, but is Wisdom himself.”

You can read some sample pages and more information about the book here: Get Wisdom! 23 Lessons for Children about Living for Jesus.

This past Sunday, Peter preached a message entitled: “The Future Heaven“, from Romans 8, briefly exploring what awaits us when Jesus returns and establishes the new heavens and new earth.

The audio is available to listen to or download from here, or via our iTunes podcast feed. here.

He used a number of excellent quotes that are worth re-readng and chewing over, so here there are – as previously promised!

Bruce Milne:
“The Jesus who says, ‘touch and see, a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have,’… is the Jesus who draws back the curtain on the heavenly life and shows us what it will be like: embodied!”

D. Martyn LLoyd-Jones:
“Everything will be glorified, even nature itself. And that seems to me to be the biblical teaching about the eternal state: that what we call heaven is life in this world as God intended humanity to live it. When he put Adam in Paradise at the beginning, Adam fell, and all fell with him, but men and women are mean’t to live in the body, and will live in a glorified body in a glorified world, and God will be with them.”

John Piper:
“God promises that the glory of his people will demand a glorious creation to live in. So the fallen creation will obtain the very freedom from futility and evil and pain that the church is given. So that when God makes all things new, he makes us new spiritually and morally, he makes us new physically, and then he makes the whole creation new so that our environment fits our perfected spirits and bodies.”

Anthony Hoekama:
“In His redemptive activity, God does not destroy the works of His hands, but cleanses them from sin and perfects them, so that they may finally reach the goal for which he created them. Applied to the problem at hand, this principle means that the new earth to which we look forward will not be totally different from the present one, but will be a renewal and glorification of the earth on which we now live.”

Anthony Hoekema:
“Because of man’s fall into sin, a curse was pronounced over this creation. God now sent his son into this world to redeem that creation from the results of sin. The work of Christ, therefore, is not just to save certain individuals, not even to save an innumerable throng of blood bought people. The total work of Christ is nothing less than to redeem this entire creation from the effects of sin. That purpose will not be accomplished until God has ushered in the new earth, until Paradise Lost has become Paradise Regained.”

This past Sunday (29th August), Matt Chapman (pictured left) led us in sharing the Lord’s Supper together, and did a brilliant job, turning our attention to the grace and love of God towards us, through the wonder of the gospel.

During his brief comments, he read a hymn that deeply affected me as it freshly redirected me to the most important person in history, the One of supreme value, the Son of God — Jesus Christ.

Matt kindly emailed it through, and I thought I’d share it with you again.  Trust it benefits your soul!

If I gained the world, but lost the Savior,
Were my life worth living for a day?
Could my yearning heart find rest and comfort
In the things that soon must pass away?
If I gained the world, but lost the Savior,
Would my gain be worth the lifelong strife?
Are all earthly pleasures worth comparing
For a moment with a Christ-filled life?

Had I wealth and love in fullest measure,
And a name revered both far and near,
Yet no hope beyond, no harbor waiting,
Where my storm-tossed vessel I could steer;
If I gained the world, but lost the Savior,
Who endured the cross and died for me,
Could then all the world afford a refuge,
Whither, in my anguish, I might flee?

O what emptiness!—without the Savior
‘Mid the sins and sorrows here below!
And eternity, how dark without Him!
Only night and tears and endless woe!
What, though I might live without the Savior,
When I come to die, how would it be?
O to face the valley’s gloom without Him!
And without Him all eternity!

O the joy of having all in Jesus!
What a balm the broken heart to heal!
Ne’er a sin so great, but He’ll forgive it,
Nor a sorrow that He does not feel!
If I have but Jesus, only Jesus,
Nothing else in all the world beside—
O then everything is mine in Jesus;
For my needs and more He will provide

– by Anne Orlander (1861-1939)

Here’s the quotes from the sermon preached on Sunday 23rd May 2010, entitled: New Life//New Words (Ephesians 4:29).

John Stott:
“Speech is a wonderful gift of God. It is one of our human capacities which reflects our likeness to God. For our God speaks, and like him we also speak. Speech distinguishes us from the animal creation. Cows can moo, dogs bark, donkeys bray, pigs grunt, lambs bleat, monkeys squeal and birds sing, but only human beings speak.”

Tullian Tchividjian:
“Words kill and words give life, they’re either poison or fruit – you choose. Words have not only destructive power but also life-giving power. They have massive potential for good and disastrous potential for evil. Our words can serve either to love or to hate, to encourage or to discourage. They have the power either to build up or tear down… That’s why Paul tells us that the church needs to be a community that use the gift of speech the way God intended, as we put off harmful words and put on helpful words… The church must be marked by a different language than the world exhibits, a peculiar speech. We must choose to speak redemptively. The sweetness and strength of the gospel – the sweetness of grace, the strength of truth – should flavour everything we say.”

Paul Tripp:
“We need to realise how “wordy” our lives actually are. Talk seems so normal, so ordinary, so unimportant, so harmless. Yet, there are few things we do that are more important. Words are powerful, important, significant. It was meant to be that way. When we speak we must speak with the realisation that God has given our words significance. He has ordained for them to be important. Words were significant in creation and at the fall. They are significant to redemption. God has given words value. So we must do all we can to assign words the importance that Scripture gives them.”

Bryan Chapell:
“Paul’s imperative (v.29) is far broader than we may expect or like. Christians are not allowed to say whatever they desire simply by rationalizing that we do not cuss or become corse. We are not even allowed to fall back upon some category of neutrality in rationalizing what we say, as in: ‘It doesn’t hurt anyone, so it’s all right to say.’ The apostle’s standard is that if it does not build up and benefit, then it is not worthy to be said.”

David Dickson:
“I have taken all my good deeds, and all my bad deeds, and have cast them together in a heap before the Lord, and have fled from both to Jesus Christ, and in Him I have sweet peace.”

Tullian Tchividjian:
“When we choose to speak redemptively — the way God intended — our words become a means of transforming grace. People encounter the grace of God as we give them a sense of who he is by the way we speak. You don’t have to be in an evangelistic conversation for your speech to be redemptive. When you treat others with your words the way that God has treated you, they’ll encounter his grace regardless of what the conversation is about. And in a world where words are so often used to destroy, this becomes a powerful exhibition of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”