QUOTES FOR REFLECTION

“Do you live with an awareness not only of his atoning work for your sinfulness but also of his longing heart amid your sinfulness?”

“For the penitent, his heart of gentle embrace is never outmatched by our sins and foibles and insecurities and doubts and anxieties and failures. For lowly gentleness is not one way Jesus occasionally acts toward others. Gentleness is who he is.”

“Jesus deals gently and only gently with all sinners who come to him...If we never come to him, we will experience a judgment so fierce it will be like a double-edged sword...If we do come to him, as fierce as his lion-like judgment would have been against us, so deep will be his lamb-like tenderness for us...To no one will Jesus be neutral.”

“Fallen, anxious sinners are limitless in their capacity to perceive reasons for Jesus to cast them out. We are factories of fresh resistances to Christ’s love. Even when we run out of tangible reasons to be cast out, such as specifics sins or failures, we tend to retain a vague sense that, given enough time, Jesus will finally grow tired of us and hold us at arm’s length.”

“He cannot bear to part with his own, even when they most deserve to be forsaken. ‘But I...’ Raise your objections. None can threaten these invincible words: ‘Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.’”

“The Spirit’s role...is to turn our postcard apprehensions of Christ’s great heart of longing affection for us into an experience of sitting on the beach, in a lawn chair, drink in hand, enjoying the actual experience. The Spirit does this decisively, once for all, at regeneration. But he does it ten thousand times thereafter, as we continue through sin and folly, or boredom to drift from the felt experience of his heart.”

~Dane Ortlund, pastor and author of Gentle and Lowly

“Your very sins move him to pity more than to anger...as all his anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it; yes his pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father is to a child that has some loathsome disease or as one is to a member of his body that has leprosy, he hates not the member, for it is his flesh, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected the more.”

~Thomas Goodwin, English Puritan pastor, 17th century

SERMON PASSAGE

Hebrews 6:1-12 (ESV)

1 Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, 2 and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. 3 And this we will do if God permits. 4 For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, 6 and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. 7 For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. 8 But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.

9 Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation. 10 For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do. 11 And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, 12 so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.