The point here is that there is no true knowledge of God and no salvation apart from childlike dependence on the grace of God in Christ crucified. If we are not willing to see ourselves as helpless, ungodly sinners and cast ourselves for mercy on the grace of God in Christ, we will not know God or be saved by him.

terms are an effort to describe the whole of biblical revelation. They are an effort to say yes to all of the Bible and not silence any of it. They are a way to say yes to the universal, saving will of 1 Timothy 2:4 and yes to the individual unconditional election of Romans 9:6

Romans 8:32 may be the most important verse in the Bible, because it establishes the unshakable connection between the greatest event in the universe and the greatest future imaginable: "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

The Christian preacher has nothing to hide. The Devil is in the business of hiding. The preacher reveals. The Devil obscures. The preacher clarifies. The Devil dulls the mind and heart. The preacher shines and burns. He is ashamed of nothing in his message. And this has everything to do with logic and right reason.

When we look back to the death and resurrection of Christ, God shows us in the present the enormity of his love for us, and thus warrants all our confidence in future grace. "God shows [present] his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died [past] for us" (Romans 5:8). Without the death of Christ, there would be no future grace.

If we live twenty-nine years or if we live ninety-nine years, would not any hardships be worth the saving of one person from the eternal torments of hell for the everlasting enjoyment of the glory of God?

That's the kind of love the Father has. It is a giving love. It gives his most precious treasure—his Son. Meditate on that this Advent. It was a very costly love. A very powerful love. A very rugged, painful love. The meaning of Christmas is the celebration of this love. "God so loved . . ." And wonder of wonders, God gives this costly love to an undeserving world of sinners, like us.

A Christian is one who recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, as God manifested in the flesh, loving us and dying for our redemption; and who is so affected by a sense of the love of this incarnate God as to be constrained to make the will of Christ the rule of his obedience, and the glory of Christ the great end for which he lives.

The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

We may not like the Jesus of the historical documents; but like him or not, we meet him there as a divine being on whom our personal destiny, both in time and in eternity, depends.

Then let no man attempt to number Israel today, but let everyone have a heart of flesh, a heart of tender sympathy, a heart that, like the heart of Christ, reaches out for the salvation of a lost world. [190]