The Radical Gospel

I read an excellent entry in The Gospel Coalition blog by Dane Ortlund. (Read it here)  Ortlund's main thesis is that our righteous living doesn't come from a new "Christianized" morality. Rather it comes from radical dependence on the grace of God.  Here are a couple of quotes:

"The gospel of grace is so radical, so free, so counterintuitive, so defiant of all the entrenched expectations of our law-marinated hearts, that it would be surprising indeed if our preaching of this gospel is not met with the objection anticipated by Paul—'are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?'"

"As for the first question (Paul being accused of antinomianism, surely the answer is the sheer gratuity—the puzzling, head-scratching, wonder-producing scandal—of free forgiveness won for us by another. Forgiveness not only of our rotten badness but also our rotten goodness. Forgiveness that confounds the inveterate semi-Pelagian simmering within every human heart since Genesis 3." 

"The other way (to holiness), which I believe is the right and biblical way, is so to startle this restraint-free culture with the gospel of free justification that the functional justifications of human approval, moral performance, sexual indulgence, or big bank accounts begin to lose their vice-like grip on human hearts and their emptiness is exposed in all its fraudulence. It sounds backward, but the path to holiness is through (not beyond) the grace of the gospel, because only undeserved grace can truly melt and transform the heart. The solution to restraint-free immorality is not morality. The solution to immorality is the free grace of God—grace so free that it will be (mis)heard by some as a license to sin with impunity. The route by which the New Testament exhorts radical obedience is not by tempering grace but by driving it home all the more deeply." 

 Father, thank you for giving us the grace to move from self-centered rebels to Christ-exalting children.

To God Alone be Glory