The initial controversy began in the 1610s & 20s when John Eaton preached against what he referred to as the re-emergence of the Galatian heresy. He believed he saw a new spiritual tradition emphasize the Law as a means to cause spiritual growth. Taking the advice of John Fox’s preface to his translation of Martin Luther’s Lectures on Galatians (1535), Eaton used Luther’s work to confront what he thought was an unlawful use of the Law. Law, for him, was meant only to make one aware of sin and the need for Christ, not to bring about righteousness. Apart from the Law Eaton taught that justification and sanctification are “inseparable companions”, that is “justification causes sanctification” and that “justification causes love.”

“The … main point of showing the majesty and utility of this benefit of justification, is, that the true joyful knowledge of justification is the only powerful means to regenerate, quicken, and sanctify us. It makes us truly to love, fear, and trust in God. Justification works in us the true Evangelical repentance. That is, sincerely hating sin, because it is sin, and in truly loving all holiness, and righteousness. And thus it is God’s holy fire that enflames his people with right thankful zeal of God’s glory, in careful and diligent walking in all God’s commandments, by willing, cheerful and readily practicing of all duties of love, both towards God and our neighbours.” (Honey-Combe, 459)

Free-grace could never lead to sin, for Eaton, only using law to bring about righteous living could do that.

Fundamentally, Eaton linked justification to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who unites us to Christ and “inflames our hearts with true love, Gal. 5:6” (Honey-Combe, MMv2). To preach law to the believer and direct their hearts to focus on their sin would distract them from the beauty of Christ which enflames their hearts to please Christ. He trusted that to love God and focus on him would cause anyone to become like him–holy. This reality cannot come by the Law but only by true union with Christ.

“But, where this rich and loving husband, Christ, takes as a wife this poor and wicked harlot, redeeming her from all evils, laying all her sins upon his shoulders. Whereby they are swallowed up in him as darkness is swallowed up in the sunbeams (Isa. 44:22). For it behoves that all sin be swallowed up at the sight of Christ, clothing and enrobing her with his own righteousness, and garnishing her with his own jewels. Whose hearts, hearing these things, will not melt for very joy, and wax ravished for very love of Christ, having received so great consolation? Any Laws or works can never possibly attain this love at all.” (465)

The fear that only inviting people to love Christ and to do what they want would lead to reckless and lawless living misses two things. First, that the person of the Spirit unites us to Christ, dwells in us, and continues to pour God’s love into our hearts. As the Spirit is the love who unites Father and Son, he is the love who unites us to Christ.   From this union comes the fruit of faith, hope and love. And second, this fear ignores the compelling nature of love, which is the greatest and fulfils all the law.

In a similar vein to Eaton, a hundred years later, Jonathan Edwards in his Charity and Its Fruits and Treatise on Grace would affirm much of Eaton’s Luther-Galatian-based-polemic.

“That love will dispose one to all proper acts of respect to both God and men. This is evident because true respect to either God or men consists in love. If a man sincerely loves God it will dispose him to give him all proper respect. Men need no other incitement to show all proper respect but love. Love to God will dispose a man to give honour to God. Love will dispose to worship and adore him, heartily to acknowledge his greatness and glory and dominion. So love will dispose a person to all acts of obedience to God.” (Charity, 94)

So, how do we grow in Christ? Paul’s answer in Galatians is to walk with Christ in the same manner that we first received him, in faith by the Spirit. Not by looking to the Law, that wouldn’t be standing firm in our freedom in Christ but returning to the yoke of slavery. Does this freedom lead to sin? By no means! If anything our freedom will produce great works abounding in joy and delight in Christ with the motive to please Christ.

Fear of licentiousness that comes from preaching the gospel as free-grace usually doesn’t engage the issues of true union with Christ by the Spirit or heart-centred human agency. This fear produces unnatural results, like introducing law as the basis of marital communion with Christ, but a law-based relationship would be disastrous. It is utterly alien to have marriage centred on anything other than your love for your spouse.

We’ve been set free from the Law and sin to live for and love Christ; we haven’t been freed from the law for the law. There’s nothing to fear, there is only freedom to enjoy.

The post Fear of Freedom first appeared on Cor Deo.

In Christianity at least three ways of determining righteousness have been promoted: an applied measure, a legal measure, and a relational measure. Applied righteousness is easy: any conduct that satisfies God’s demands makes a person righteous. Legal righteousness is broader: if a person has been judged guilty for his sins God is free to offer a reprieve by dismissing the legal charges against him.

Martin Luther, for instance, used this understanding when he spoke of Christians having an “alien righteousness” through faith in Christ. In his view a given believer is granted the full moral standing of the Son—absolute righteousness—through faith, even though the believer’s conduct still falls well short of Christ’s applied righteousness. In other words a person’s applied righteousness isn’t critical; the Father’s forgiveness in Christ through faith is what counts.

This debate was central to the 16th century Protestant Reformation as the Roman Church dismissed Luther’s claim and insisted that Christians must work to achieve actual righteousness through a “faith formed by love”. And the Roman version of love was will-based—a function of self-determined obedience—rather than an affective love. Spirituality, then, grows as a responsibility of the seeker rather than as a response to God’s love. God, in their view, is a righteous judge who demands that his followers rise to his ethical standards. Conduct that falls short remains under God’s righteous wrath.

Luther, on the other hand, believed that God is a lover who draws us into the affective bond of the Father and the Son. Love, in turn, is a shared delight and response to a loving God by his beloved ones. And the devotion of love—our faith—is what changes us to be more and more like the Son in our daily conduct. Our hearts follow after the heart of the one we love.

With that historical sketch in mind I was struck with Paul’s discussion of sin in Romans 3. There the relational righteousness of God comes into focus. The chapter famously declares that all humanity is morally broken: “None is righteous, no, not even one; no one understands; not one seeks for God” (verses 10-11). So human righteousness, by this measure, is nonsense and pretense. No one, apart from Christ, ever achieves actual righteousness.

What catches our attention in the following verses is Paul’s resolution of the problem: of “how the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

What’s striking is how Paul set out the problem of sin in the earlier verses of the chapter: he began by framing sin as a problem of faithlessness in verse 3—“What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means!” Next, in a restatement in verse 5, Paul set out the same concern but with a new term in place of faith-concerns. “But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? . . . . By no means!” The two expressions are parallel so that unrighteousness is aligned with faithlessness.

Faithfulness and faithlessness are terms that press us towards a relational rather than a legal focus, but the two are coordinate concerns. Think, for instance, of the refrain that comes with so many broken marriages—“The spouse was unfaithful.” In such cases God’s law is certainly broken but the deeper issue is the violation of love.

And that refrain, as it relates to God and his people, jumps off the pages of the Old Testament in any rapid reading of the Bible. Jeremiah, for instance, treats it as a central theme in his warnings to Judah: “You have played the whore with many lovers; and would you return to me? declares the LORD. . . . She saw that for all the adulteries of that faithless one, Israel, I had sent her away with a decree of divorce. Yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but she too went and played the whore” (Jer. 3:1 & 8).

The contrast between the faithful husband-who-is-God and his faithless bride, Israel, is played out again and again in the Old Testament. Hosea’s marriage to faithless Gomer is the vivid picture of God’s anguish over his faithless creation.

In this book the prophet goes beyond Israel to address the faithlessness of humanity as a whole: “But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me” (Hosea 6:7). But God persistently refuses to give his bridal people away to their predilection for evil and promises to draw back at least some to himself: “And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul” (Jer. 32:40-41).

Here’s the point: we will do well to reflect on God’s real “heart” and “soul” desire for us to have a love relationship with him that is sound. We aren’t meant to give our hearts away to the love of success, wealth, security, and the like—to self-love—but to be wholly devoted to Christ. This is what we were made for. And this is what ultimately defines righteousness rather than mere law-keeping. Laws only confront broken relationships; they don’t build faithful hearts. Luther was right in his emphasis on God’s role in restoring us. We won’t ever do it on our own.

So faithfulness and righteousness is the fruit of love. The gospel is God’s call for us to turn back to him, to hear his expressions of faithful love. That alone will stir us to love him in return—both wholly and faithfully.

The post Righteous? first appeared on Cor Deo.

As the family enjoyed each other in conversation, you can easily imagine the adults’ full attention was drawn away from the youngest of kids.  One of these times, I, a young toddler, rode my tricycle around the pool until I rode it into the pool without anyone noticing.  As the story goes, when my grandmother saw me face down in the pool she jumped in to save me.  The only problem was that she couldn’t swim either.  Her cry for help and the sound of the splash grabbed my father’s attention and he jumped in to save both of us.

If we rewind the story just a couple moments back to the point when my father heard the splash and cry for help, at that moment in time he had two options. One option was that he could save his mother and his son by throwing some kind of flotation device to us.  The device would give my grandmother the ability to float and swim to the side of the pool on her own.  Or he could jump into the pool so that he himself could be the swimmer and save us from death.

Let me posit this episode as a possible picture to speak about the differing views on the nature of grace. That either grace is a flotation device given from afar that enables one who cannot swim to swim, or that grace is a person jumping in to save and be depended on for everything.  This contradistinction is the Rubicon between Christian traditions formed by systematic theology and biblical theology. Systematic or scholastic traditions start with certain philosophical presumptions and categories about God and humanity. These presuppositions are supported with proof texts from the Bible.  Whereas biblical theology attempts to let the story of God’s pursuit of a people for himself shape the way we speak of God, man, sin, and grace.

In terms of grace, this distinction is best seen by beginning with Peter Lombard  (c.1096-1164). He, in his Sentences, asked, “Is the love by which we are saved a created habit of our soul, or is it the very person of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us?”(Lombard, Sentences 1.17; in Ozment, The Age of Reform, 31).   Lombard, in agreement with Augustine’s use of Romans 5:5, states that the “Holy Spirit is the love by which we love God and our neighbor.”  That grace isn’t our nature to offer charity or a new habit given to us by the Spirit, which enables us to consistently live a life of love. Rather, the gift purchased by Christ according to Augustine is “plainly the Holy Spirit who is God and the third person of the Trinity…” (Sentences, 1.14.46).  In other words, the Spirit doesn’t give us a lifesaver that enables us to swim when we can’t.  Instead Christ jumps in and unites himself to us by the Spirit, just as the Father is one with the Son by the Spirit (Sentences, 1.17.65).

Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on Lombard’s Sentences rejected the notion that the Spirit is the gift given because this would mean our love would not be in our control nor responsible for our good acts.   Also, if this were the case, according to Aquinas, it would mean that God would then have to jump into the pool of creation, which would be an absurdity when God and creation are incommensurate – that is, two natures that cannot correspond.  These conclusions aren’t based on Scripture, but are presuppositions based in Aristotle’s view of God as the unmoved mover and humanity as independent self-moved choosers. Therefore God, from a transcendent distance, throws a lifesaver, i.e. he gives the capacity to swim to people who don’t have the ability to swim.

To put it in terms of sin and righteousness, Aquinas and Aristotle assumed that the practice of righteous deeds makes one become righteous.  But here’s the problem, sin keeps me from practicing righteousness consistently long enough to form a habit of righteousness.  So God gives me the habit of righteousness by the Spirit. However, we find Jesus said that a bad tree only produces bad fruit. Not until a bad tree is made into a good tree can good fruit be produced.  Jesus assumed that being actually leads to doing, not the other way around.

Listening to Jesus’ words the Reformers rejected Aristotelian categories and sided with Lombard. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Cranmer all rejected the use of habitus as a way for God to give grace without jumping into the swimming pool.  From Luther’s commentary on The Sentences to Cranmer’s tenth article in the Forty-Two Articles of Religion, grace was the person of the Spirit pouring the love of God into our hearts, who truly unites us to Christ.

One of the countless ways this makes a difference is in our prayer life.  Often I hear and pray for God’s help, but what is meant by “help” counts for everything in the extreme.  If help is just God giving me some kind of power or ability from a distance to face the difficulties of the day, I’m back to thinking of grace as a commodity or the life jacket.  But if I mean “help” in the sense “I need you Jesus today more than ever, please help walk through the day with you because I can do nothing apart from you,” I’m relying on a person and not a flotation device.

The post Help first appeared on Cor Deo.

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

as a seal upon your arm

for love is strong as death,

jealousy is fierce as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,

the very flame of the LORD.

Many waters cannot quench love,

neither can floods drown it,

If a man offered for love

all the wealth of his house,

he would be utterly despised. (8:6-7)

The power of love is rarely acknowledged in our everyday lives as the indomitable force behind all that we think and do. In other words, we don’t see the Bible describing a reality where we have a free will that chooses between two opposing opposites. Rather it assumes our minds and wills are mere instruments of our hearts.  The heart, as the motivational center, controls and dictates to the mind what to think and the will what to choose. Therefore, the object of our affections controls us.  With this in mind, I want to take a look of one particular danger about having a tameless tiger in our chest–that is, the danger of loving love.

As a pastor I became aware that many might be attracted to Christianity, not on account of Christ, but the love they received from those who love Christ.  Now you may think, isn’t this the way it should work? As we love people won’t they often eventually come to love Christ?  Yes we should evangelize by offering love to others!  But as we invite people to love Christ by loving on them, potentially they could come to love the love they receive and not Christ.

Given the reality of us being bound by the affections of our hearts, and our fallen hearts being completely bent on loving self, it shouldn’t surprise us that someone might love being loved.  Let’s face it, someone might function like this, “I love me and I love it when people love me.”  Not that this is a conscious thought, but people who’ve experienced abuse or abandonment might easily fall in love with the love they’ve rarely received.

In some situations its obvious that one loves love: they begin to take advantage of others, they only show up when they’ve had a rough day and they need to be loved, or they just don’t really seem to want to know why you’ve loved them.   But in others cases, the lover of love begins to play the part of a Christian. They begin to come to everything, they begin to read their Bibles, and maybe profess a belief in Christ. But when the person who has loved them goes away for a time the lover of love gradually, if not quickly, goes back to their old ways.

This reminds me of Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560).  He was a brilliant humanist scholar who fell in love with love.  As one of Martin Luther’s most devoted followers, he was swept up by the wave of Luther’s passion for Christ, zealous rejection of Scholastic Theology, and the need for reformation.  “All of Aristotle’s works,” according to Luther, “are the worst enemy of grace.”  It was a tectonic shift for Melanchthon to agree with Luther’s “Aristotle was to theology as darkness is to light.”  Prior to Melanchthon’s encounter with Luther his main ambition was to compile a Greek edition of Aristotle’s works that hadn’t previously existed in the West.  Instead he wrote his 1521 Loci Communes, a book that summarized Luther’s theology so well that Luther, with tongue firmly in his cheek, suggested it should have been canonized.

Yet this rejection of Scholastic Theology and his full devotion to Luther’s theology didn’t last.  In Luther’s absence and under the pressure of other events, Melanchthon retreated back to Aristotle. The three latter editions of his Loci Communes completely abandoned the bondage of the free will, which according to Luther was the “hinge” at the center of his reformation.  Melanchthon had gotten caught up in the tidal wave of the man, but when the wave was gone Melanchthon made his way back to his first love, Aristotle.

Knowing the powerful dictator inside, we can’t be subtle about the reasons for our loving others.  Being aware that people could fall in love with love or really just make the giver of love into a Christ-like figure, we must make it clear that we love because we are loved.  Love isn’t the end or the goal; rather, pleasing Christ is our motivation, he is the end and he is the goal. We must be clear that it’s a love for Christ, who loved us and esteemed us first, that frees us to love. This won’t stop fallen people from being lovers of love, but it makes Christ the source and reason for our love of others.  This isn’t mechanical or fake, but as we love Christ, who has loved us first, we begin to love what Christ loves. Thankfully he loves all of us with a love that cannot be measured nor exhausted even when we get an eternity to explore it.

The post Lovers of Love first appeared on Cor Deo.

Before he became the famous Reformer, “stubborn and unbending” in his pursuit of Christ and standing up to both Emperor and Pope, Luther was not all that remarkable.  For example, he was not an outstanding student, finishing thirtieth of fifty-seven candidates in his first university exam.  He probably only received an education because of his mother’s social status and connections, rather than due to his abilities.  Luther was a normal man, nothing special.

So what happened?  What caused Luther, the unimpressive student, to become the remarkable Professor of Biblical Theology at Wittenberg?

Luther’s Discovery of God’s Righteousness: Prior to reading Augustine and Paul’s letter to the Romans, the righteousness of God was “the grim wrath of God, with which he punished sin.”  Haunted by the burden of God’s righteousness, Luther hated Paul for writing that it was in the Gospel that the righteousness of God was revealed. But when Luther went back and continued to read that “the righteous shall live by faith,” along with Augustine’s thoughts on the text, Luther discovered that “the righteousness of God is His mercy through which he regards us and keeps us just. Thus I was comforted.” He went from hating the “righteousness of God,” to loving and treasuring it. (Luther, 153)

This new paradigm, that God’s righteousness clothed us with His righteousness, freed Luther from the bondage of trying to appease the wrath of God with his works.  God’s righteousness now gave him the great assurance that God was for him and that God only wanted “the gaze of our hearts” upon Christ not on our sin. (Gal, 29)

Luther discovered and experienced the reality of God’s goodness–that is, God giving of himself to us.  By faith we are united to his Son, our Bridegroom, who paid for all our sin on the cross and we receive all that is his–life, glory, and love.  Having true union with Christ means that the Father relates to us as perfectly righteousness in Christ and faith is the certainty that this is true (despite still living in our fallen flesh with the enemy telling us otherwise).

There was another critical discovery for Luther’s personal reformation and the Reformation, a clearer and biblical view of “our adversary, who prowls around and seeks to devour us.”

Luther’s Discovery of the true Satan: The existence of the devil wasn’t a question for anyone living in the medieval period.  However, just like the righteousness of God, the reality of the enemy and his deceptive methods were greatly twisted.

The medieval images of Satan as the red beast with horns and pointed tale surrounded by his demons are well known to us.  He enticed people to commit and participate in his evil so that he could have control over them in the fiery depths of hell.  This foe, the “dark devil,” prompts people to “overt acts of evil” like murder, theft, drunkenness, etc. –an idea well known to Luther and his contemporaries. But Luther, as an overflow of his experience of God’s true righteousness, suddenly was confronted with the real Satan, the “white devil.”

Thus the black devil always emerges in the disguise and covering of all his works and tricks. But in the spiritual area, where Satan emerges not black but white, in the guise of an angel or even God Himself, there he puts himself forward with very sly pretense and amazing tricks.  He peddles his deadly poison as the doctrine of grace, the Word of God, and the Gospel of Christ. This is why Paul calls the doctrine of the false apostles and ministers of Satan a “gospel,” saying, “to a different gospel.” (Gal, 49)

The false gospel for Luther mixed the Law and the Gospel.  To preach righteousness and holiness is to “hate and condemn as evil and demonic the righteousness of Christ.”

This means that sin isn’t just vice, ruled and promoted by the dark devil, but also seemingly virtuous morality, ruled and promoted by the white devil–the real devil transformed into an angel of light.  Actually, then, vices of slander, adultery, covetousness, and others, for Luther, are “minor compared” with the world when “it is at its best in men who are religious, wise, and learned; yet in them it is actually evil twice over.” (Gal, 40-1)

What did this mean for Luther? Luther realized that he lived in a constant tension between the truth of being in Christ by faith, yet with our flesh and the enemy enticing us to take our eyes off that truth.  The Law, then, had no place for him because it was a means to cause us to feel and know that we are sinners, the exact opposite reality of the Gospel.

Therefore the doctrine of grace simply cannot stand with the doctrine of the Law.  One of them must be rejected and abolished, and the other must be confirmed or substantiated.  But just as the Jews were inclined away from this doctrine of faith and grace, so we also are inclined away from it.  I personally would like to keep both the righteousness of grace as that which justifies and the righteousness of the Law as the basis for God’s attitude toward me.  But, as Paul says here, confusing these means perverting the Gospel of Christ. (Gal., 54)

For Luther, it was no surprise that the Law and works would often win out.  It is the gravitational force of our flesh to prefer Law and works over grace.  This was the battle Luther recognized in this life.  However, God’s attitude toward us is constant, for we are always seen in Christ.  Thus the Father’s love for us can never increase or decrease.

How often do the world and our flesh tell us that what people think of us, combined with how we perform, determine who we are as a person?  The Gospel proclaims the exact opposite message: the Son of God is our Bridegroom, he has taken all our debts and given us all his riches!

The post Luther’s Discoveries first appeared on Cor Deo.

The reason for mentioning this is that most Lutherans today—those who embrace the Formula of Concord—treat the believer’s legal standing with Christ as primary and his indwelling as a follow-up benefit.  As such a believer’s justification is distinct from union with Christ, and union is treated as a benefit of faith and salvation.

But Mannermaa, a Lutheran scholar, views this arrangement as “alien to the Reformer” (p.41).  The nature of righteousness is, instead, a matter of the soul being transformed by Christ’s presence so that Christ’s union and the soul’s justification is the same event.  The shift away from Luther’s view, Mannermaa suggests, was Philip Melanchthon’s work.

I would add that this dismissed Luther’s immediate and experiential faith in favor of a more rational and disaffected arrangement.  Luther’s view was derived from the biblical language of marital union in which Christ’s initiative is the defining event of salvation: the divine lover comes and wins his beloved’s heart and that inaugurates faith as a response.

What follows from this pursuit and response?  Let’s turn to Luther’s own words in “The Freedom of a Christian” (1520—taken from his Three Treatises, 286-87).

“The third incomparable benefit of faith is that it unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom.  By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul become one flesh [Eph. 5:31-32].  And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage—indeed the most perfect of all marriages, since human marriages are but poor examples of this one true marriage—it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil.”

This last feature—the common possession of good and evil—was critical in Luther’s use of the divine-human marital exchange to explain the ontology of justification in Bible terms.  Every other feature of salvation flows out of this exchange.  We return to Luther:

“Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own.  Let us compare these and we shall see inestimable benefits.  Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation.  The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation.  Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his.”

The clarity and simplicity of this understanding overturns the layers of legal and metaphysical conjurings that grew out of medieval scholasticism—most of which were put in place for the sake of non-biblical premises.  These included the idea that God’s radical difference-in-being as Creator from the creation—incommensurability—precludes such a union.  There was also a belief taken from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (who merely articulated human common sense) that God requires humans to be free moral agents who play some role in achieving salvation.  Both notions are reasonable but biblically wrong-headed.

What Luther had experienced in his own conversion and found anchored in the Bible is that any and every moment of human salvation reveals God’s Heart moving the human heart to respond.  How?  By the work of Christ’s wooing Holy Spirit who pours out God’s love in that person’s heart.

When we turn to the Bible to measure Luther’s view that faith is our experience of and response to God’s love we find support in every direction.  In the Old Testament the marital motif is common—usually with God’s heart being broken accompanied by his promise to restore a bond of love—as in Isaiah 53-54, Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 16, all of Hosea, and more.  In the New Testament Luther’s key passages of 1 Corinthians 6 and Ephesians 5 make sense of the final wedding supper of the Lamb in Revelation.

This, in turn, sets up an expectation that faith involves the ongoing experience of God’s love—what Paul presumes in Romans 8—with intimate features such as the Spirit’s witness that we are now free to call the Father “Abba”.  There is also Jesus’ celebration in John 17 of his love for the Father that he intends to be the shared experience of all true believers.

What, then, of claims by many notable Christian scholars that faith is a disaffected and will-based effort by grace-enabled souls?

A good question!  It reflects, in part, another marriage: of Aristotle’s philosophy to Christianity, which Thomas Aquinas facilitated.  It may also reflect the rationalisations by professing Christians who are still resisting the Spirit’s wooing call—as in Paul’s kicking against the “goads” of Christ before his Damascus road conversion.  Real faith always works through love—a real love as is found in sound, affectively rich marriages.

Luther and his kin, of course, must not be accused of promoting a spiritual tautology—the experience of experience—as if mere experience is a proper ambition.  The only source of proper Christian experience is Christ himself, and to know him in a Heart-to-heart bond is to love him.

If any readers haven’t experienced this love I invite you to pray for eyes to see him and for ears to hear his gracious voice: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”  If you do pray, be assured—as in John 3—that Christ’s Spirit will have been stirring you already and his newfound presence that follows will feel like a breeze stirring the once still forest of your soul.

Pray and see for yourself.

The post Experiencing God first appeared on Cor Deo.