It must be an odd feeling to be thankful to nobody in particular. Christians in public institutions often see this odd thing happening on Thanksgiving Day. Everyone in the institution seems to be thankful ‘in general.’ It’s very strange. It’s a little like being married in general (Cornelius Plantina, Jr in Assurances of the Heart).”

There is a fantasy abroad that the Christian community can have a center without a circumference. Since we gather around Jesus, it is argued, it is our center, not our boundaries, that matter. But this is the persistent illusion of complulsive hypertolerationism. A community with no boundaries can neither have a center nor be a community (Thomas Oden, ‘Why We Believe in Heresy,’ Christianity Today, March 4, 1996).

Tolerance is the virtue of people who don’t believe anything.*

Quoted in The American Hour, by Os Guinness, New York: The Free Press, A Division of macmillan, Inc, 1993, page 174).

Moses emerges with God’s Ten Commandments, a set of requirements that people have to fulfill not in order to get rescued by God from slavery, but because they have been rescued.

Stated succinctly, the imperative of the Christian life (be godly) follows the indicative (we have been freed from sin).

At the very least, read the below quote from E.B. White.

Alan Jacobs, an author I thoroughly enjoy reading, writes:

At the always-wonderful Letters of Note, some lovely responses from writers asked to tell the children of Troy, Michigan what’s good about a library. My favorite response is E. B. White’s, tinged as it is with that gentle melancholy that characterizes most of his writing and that children responded to surprisingly well:

A library is many things. It’s a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It’s a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books — the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go. Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together — just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people — people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

Darryl Dash, who takes better notes than I, posted one moment from our time together. Haddon Robinson says that there are five questions that matter:

1. Is there a God?
2. Has he revealed himself?
3. Did he reveal himself in Jesus?
4. Did the death of Jesus on the cross do anything for anyone else?
5. Did Jesus rise from the dead?

If you start with the last question, he says, it answers all the others.

. . . I said, “Do you want to know what you are saved from? In a word, you are saved from God.” They just gasped and to this day when I attend that convention people come up to me and say, “I had never thought of that until I heard your message.” It is God who saves people from God because his wrath is stored up against the day of wrath, and he most certainly will demonstrate, as he has demonstrated his love toward us “in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  (Commentary on Romans, 161, emphasis added).

Sproule references Romans 5:8 in making his point, but John 3:36 also comes to mind:

Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him (John 3:36).

John Frame:

Grudging obedience is not what he desires of us.  It may be better than no obedience at all, but it is seriously defective. We should seek, not only to obey him, but also to delight in obedience. That delight comes from prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, through immersion in the words of Scripture and the hearts of the great saints of redemptive history, and through the fellowship of the church in Word and sacrament.  The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 306.

In true repentance there is no rationalization.  There is no attempt to minimize guilt.  There is no attempt at self-justification, which is the human tendency (Commentary on Romans, 82).

God’s love is incomprehensible and unchangeable. For it was not after we were reconciled to him through the blood of his Son that he began to love us. Rather, he has loved us before the world was created, that we also might be his sons along with his only-begotten Son—before we became anything at all.

The fact that we were reconciled through Christ’s death must not be understood as if his Son reconciled us to him that he might now begin to love those whom he had hated. Rather, we have already been reconciled to him who loves us, with whom we were enemies on account of sin. The apostle will testify whether I am speaking the truth: ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ [Rom. 5:8]. Therefore, he loved us even when we practiced enmity toward him and committed wickedness.

Thus in a marvelous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us. For he hated us for what we were that he had not made; yet because our wickedness had not entirely consumed his handiwork, he knew how, at the same time, to hate in each one of us what he had made, and to love what he had made.

Quoted in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 506-507.

HT: Desiring God