Of First Importance is a great blog I check daily. It is filled with quotes about the gospel and our identity in Christ. If you haven’t already subscribed, you need to. Here is just a smattering:
“Christians don’t think God will love us because we’re good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
“God’s love is relentless in its determination that we be cured of our sins, at whatever the cost to us or to Him.”
“Jesus gave Himself for us in His death that He might give Himself to us in His life.”
“You will cleanse no sin from your life that you have not first recognized as being pardoned through the cross. This is because holiness starts in the heart. The essence of holiness is not new behavior, activity, or disciplines. Holiness is new affections, new desires, and new motives that then lead to new behavior. If you don’t see your sin as completely pardoned, then your affections, desires, and motives will be wrong. You will aim to prove yourself. Your focus will be the consequences of your sin rather than hating the sin and desiring God in its place.”
“Grace dismantles your confidence in you, while it gives you more hope and courage than you have ever had.”
“None of our poor human explanations of life’s dark mystery can heal the hurt of baffled and tormented souls. Nothing can suffice but this — to see Love Incarnate taking upon itself the very worst that suffering and evil can do upon the earth, God going into action once for all against the powers of darkness, Christ reigning from the deadly tree, and making His victory there the pledge and the assurance for all the sons of men.”
“One of the sweetest statements from the lips of Jesus . . . is this: ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world’ (Matt. 25:34b). There is a plan of God designed for your salvation. It is not an afterthought or an attempt to correct a mistake. Rather, from all eternity, God determined that He would redeem for Himself a people, and that which He determined to do was, in fact, accomplished in the work of Jesus Christ, His atonement on the cross. Your salvation has been accomplished by a Savior, One who did for you what the Father determined He should do. He is your Surety, your Mediator, your Substitute, your Redeemer. He atoned for your sins on the cross.”
“We don’t change so we can prove ourselves to God. We’re accepted by God so we can change. God gives us a new identity, and this new identity is the motive and basis for our change.”
“Christ is our holiness in the same sense in which he is our righteousness. He is a complete and all-sufficient Savior. He does not accomplish his work halfway but saves us really and completely. He does not rest until, after pronouncing his acquittal in our conscience, he has also imparted full holiness and glory to us.
By his righteousness, accordingly, he does not just restore us to the state of the just who will go scot-free in the judgment of God, in order then to leave us to ourselves to reform ourselves after God’s image and to merit eternal life. But Christ has accomplished everything. He bore for us the guilt and punishment of sin, placed himself under the law to secure eternal life for us, and then arose from the grave to communicate himself to us in all his fullness for both our righteousness and sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30). The holiness that must completely become ours therefore fully awaits us in Christ.”
