Extravagant Grace

Metadata

Author: Barbara Duguid
Full Title: Extravagant Grace
Category: #books

Highlights

Let’s be honest: if the chief work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification is to make Christians more sin-free, then he isn’t doing a very good job.
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God could have saved us and made us instantly perfect. Instead, he chose to save us and leave indwelling sin in our hearts and bodies to wage war against the new and blossoming desires to please God that accompany salvation.
God thinks that you will actually come to know and love him better as a desperate and weak sinner in continual need of grace than you would as a triumphant Christian warrior who wins each and every battle against sin.
I know many Christians who are trying hard to be holy, but few who are able to balance that hard work with joyful resting at the same time.
John Newton shows us from Scripture that true sanctification is all about growing in humility, dependence, and gratitude.
Although they are given by God and meant for his comfort, the baby Christian rests in these early feelings and successes and thinks that he will always have them.
to become a Christian a person must understand in some way that he is a sinner, but at the same time he does not and cannot know immediately the depth of depravity that remains within him. Therefore, he typically expects too much of himself as he aims at obedience.
The young and zealous convert one day finds that his comforts are withdrawn: he finds that he has no heart to pray, no appetite for reading God’s word, and no desire to attend church.
Because the law of God is written on his heart and the gospel has not yet sunk in deeply, the baby Christian gravitates toward those Scriptures that tell him what to do, and there are many.
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Baby Christians are a lot like that little boy who was desperate to know that he was loved in spite of his naughtiness. They cannot yet imagine that their heavenly Father could always be pleased with them because of Christ’s obedience in their place
He rightly longs for joy in God, and it is on the way. By a deeper discovery of the gospel he will soon come to trust more fully in God’s acceptance of him and rest on the finished work of Christ.
Understanding Newton’s stages of growth has helped me to become more patient with young believers and gentler in my speech toward them.
God not only determines whom he will draw to himself, but he governs all of the circumstances and situations from which he calls each one, as well as the settings in which they will grow.
Even though Ginny may live many years as a believer and still remain immature and young in the faith, she is a shining beacon glowing brightly in a dark world, loudly proclaiming God’s power to save and preserve all whom he has chosen through a variety of life circumstances.
- Note: “loudly proclaiming”? How, exactly? What distinguishes Ginny from a non-believer who has survived a variety of life circumstances?
He does not ordain the beginning and the end of your story only to leave the middle part—your life as a believer here on earth—up to you! That means that, at this very moment, you are exactly as holy and mature in your faith as God wants you to be.
Furthermore, all the people whom you love and wish were more mature are also exactly where God wants them to be right now.
our spiritual growth is not up to us, nor is the spiritual growth of the people around us.
if you as a believer are indwelt by the Holy Spirit of the living God, you have no choice but to change and grow according to his good pleasure.
God is too kind to show us all our sin at one time or at a time when we are too immature to bear the sight.
more? If his goal is that we see more and more sin, then he is ordaining to leave and tolerate a great deal of sin in us for his higher purpose.
As parents, we are sometimes more invested in protecting our children from the sinful influences of this world than we are in preparing them for the deep sinfulness of their own hearts.
Simply building a fence between a child and temptation is not the same thing as preparing him to face life.
We can see how God has acted in the great events of redemption to rescue his people both from and through the sinful acts of their enemies.
One of the ways to see that is to think about some of the times in your life when you wanted to sin but God didn’t let you.
at each point where you sinned—and that would be many times each day—God allowed you to do so for his good purposes. He does not love your sin, tempt you to it, or cause it in any way, yet by permitting it, he ordains it for your good and his glory.8
In the very next minute, I received another gift from God: the clear and undeniable knowledge that unless he gives me fresh grace every minute of every day, sin is still what I do best. How does that truth glorify God and benefit
I had thought God loved a victorious and triumphant heart, but I began to learn that God loves a humble and contrite heart (Ps. 51:17; Isa. 66:2) and has many surprising ways of forming these attributes within his children.
He was a spectator to grace; he admired the concept and enjoyed talking about its theological implications, but felt no deep personal need of it himself.