Inverted Grace

Here are some great quotes from a John Piper interview. Listen to the whole thing here.

We are so much into making the church attractive to the culture that we dumb down the very things that make the gospel intelligible. You can’t make any sense out of the gospel without the wrath of God, the gospel is the means by which God undertook to rescue people from his own wrath. If there were no wrath , there would be no gospel… People don’t like to talk about the wrath of God and therefore the gospel is undermined in that you can’t articulate the central meaning of the cross because people can’t see the fundamental reason why they need a blood sacrifice and an alternative righteousness because God isn’t really that mad at anybody, is he? So, even in evangelicalism I think we are in need of preserving the content of the gospel and the grounds of why it is so necessary. They aren’t that popular for people to talk about and yet I just preached about the wrath of God last Sunday …and one young woman was there with her brother-in-law and he was scared to death that this secular unbelieving woman would walk out of this message on the wrath of God and by the end she was saying, “I’ve got to come back and hear more about that.” She was in tears because she heard that her need was way bigger than she thought it was.

…The cross today is being used to exalt our worth as the central piece of the gospel and so people will say, “Look christ died for me. I must be a diamond in the rough,” and we invert grace. But grace says you are not a diamond in the rough, you are a piece of coal on the way to hell and if God doens’t justify the ungodly you don’t have a prayer. What I want to say is, according to Romans 3:25, that God put Christ forward on the cross as a propitiation by his bloddd to be recieved by faith. This was to demosntrate his righteoussness so that He might be both just and justifier of him who has faith in jesus. So the cross is all about vindicating the glory of God, the righteuossness of God. So that when He justifies me, a sinner, He gets the glory I get the joy. I don’t get the tribute, I don’t get the glory. He gets the glory, I get the help.

Word

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