Confronted by Grace

John Webster

Description

"I found myself joining in his joyful 'Amen!' to all of the promises that we have in Jesus Christ." --Michael HortonIn this rich collection of sermons, John Webster considers the power of the gospel and the truth of God's grace. Born from years of theological and biblical study, these reflections serve to challenge, stimulate, and inspire, demonstrating the grace of God at work in the complexities of life.By pointing us toward Christ, Confronted by Grace helps us grow in our understanding of the truth of the gospel.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781577996095
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Confronted by Grace
Meditations of a Theologian
John Webster
Edited by Daniel Bush & Brannon Ellis
Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian
Edited by Daniel Bush & Brannon Ellis
Copyright 2014 John Webster
Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
LexhamPress.com
All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail] .
Previously published as The Grace of Truth (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Oil Lamp Books LLC , 2011).
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked ( NLT ) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked ( RSV ) are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked ( KJV ) are from the King James Version. Public domain.
Lexham Editorial Team: David Bomar
Cover Design: Christine Gerhart
for my brother
Michael Webster
Contents
Preface
Part I: Gravity and Grace
Chapter 1: The Lie of Self-Sufficiency
Chapter 2: The Great Contrast
Chapter 3: Believe in the Lord Jesus
Chapter 4: Dead to Sin
Chapter 5: He Who Comforts
Part II: The Suffering Servant
Chapter 6: Hearing the passion
Chapter 7: Sin Shattered within Its Stronghold
Chapter 8: Lifted High in Humiliation
Chapter 9: Take this Holy Sacrament
Chapter 10: The Triumph of Divine Resolve
Part III: Hearing God
Chapter 11: Listen to Him
Chapter 12: Praising God
Chapter 13: Belonging to God
Chapter 14: Obeying God
Chapter 15: The Hearing Church
Part IV: Living by Promises
Chapter 16: God’s Sustaining Presence
Chapter 17: The Call to Remembrance
Chapter 18: The Nature of Faith
Chapter 19: The Way of Holiness
Chapter 20: Yes in Christ
Part V: Pressing On
Chapter 21: The Heart of Perseverance
Chapter 22: Endurance
Chapter 23: Waiting Patiently
Chapter 24: Christian Contentment
Chapter 25: Do Not Be Anxious
Chapter 26: The Day of God
Preface
P REACHING IS ONE of the principal ways in which the God of the gospel has dealings with us. The gospel’s God is eloquent: He does not remain locked in silence, but speaks. He does this supremely in the mission of the Son of God, the very Word of God who becomes flesh, communicating with human creatures in human ways, most of all in human speech. The Son of God comes as a preacher ( Mark 1:38 ); this is a primary purpose and one of the most characteristic activities of his earthly ministry. His apostles, too, are summoned by him to preach the gospel: to speak from him and about him, to address their fellow creatures with testimony to the gospel. And this apostolic commission remains for the Church. Paul’s charge to Timothy—“Preach the word” ( 2 Timothy 4:2 )—extends to the Christian community now, and faithfulness to the charge is basic to the way in which the Church fulfills its nature and mission as the community of the Word of God. The Church of the Word is a Church in which, alongside praise, prayer, lament, sacraments, witness, service, fellowship and much else, there takes place the work of preaching.
There are at least three elements to preaching. First: Holy Scripture. Scripture is the body of texts which God forms to be his “Word,” his communication with us in human language. In these texts, God teaches us, gives us knowledge—of himself, of ourselves, and of his ways with us. Preaching is not any sort of public Christian discourse; it is the Church saying something about the words of this text, on the basis of the words of this text, under this text’s authority, direction and judgment. Second: the congregation. At the Lord’s summons, the people of God gather in his presence. They gather in the expectation that something from God will be said to them—that however anxious, weary or indifferent they may be, the God of the gospel will address them with the gospel, will help them to hear what he says, and will instruct them on how to live life in his company. Third: the sermon. God speaks to the congregation through the human words of one who is appointed by God to “minister” the Word, to be an auxiliary in God’s own speaking. The sermon repeats the scriptural Word in other human words, following the Word’s movement and submitting to its rule. In this, the sermon assists in the work of the divine Word, which builds up the Church, making its life deep, steady, and vital.
The sermons in this book hardly match up to this understanding of preaching. Reading them through, I am acutely conscious that much could be said differently and better. Most of them were delivered in the years when I served as a canon of Christ Church cathedral in Oxford; a few were preached elsewhere. Daniel Bush and Brannon Ellis undertook the rather arduous task of editing the texts and preparing for publication, improving them a great deal in the process; I am grateful for their help.
Part I: Gravity and Grace
Chapter 1: The Lie of Self-Sufficiency
Matthew 21:33–39
There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.” And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
Matthew 21:33–39
O NE WAY OF COMING TO UNDERSTAND the events of Holy Week is to think of them as the triumph of falsehood . Beginning on Palm Sunday with the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and over the next few days moving inexorably to its climax, the drama of the passion unfolds as one thing: as a consistent, willful, institutionally orchestrated rejection of the truth—as the acting out of a lie.
What unites the cast of characters which are assembling before us as we read through the narratives of the passion of Christ is this: all together—religious leaders, the disciples, the governing authorities in the person of Pilate, and the chorus of minor players—in their various ways conspire to deny the truth. They all choose darkness rather than light; they all fail to acknowledge what above all they ought to acknowledge, that in the man Jesus they are faced with the presence of God himself. And the events in which they are caught up, the putting to death of the Son of God, are as a whole and in all their detail the embodiment of the great lie, the ultimate untruth.
Why do we tell lies? We lie to evade reality; we lie because the truth is too painful or too shameful for us to face, or because the truth is simply inconvenient and has to be suppressed before it’s allowed to disturb us. We invent lies because, for whatever reason, we want to invent reality. And the false reality which we invent, the world we make up by our lying, has one great advantage for us: It makes no claims on us. It demands nothing. It doesn’t shape us in the way that truth shapes us; it faces us with no obligations; it has no hard, resistant surfaces which we can’t get through. A lie is a made-up reality, and so never unsettles, never criticizes, never resists, never overthrows us. It’s the world, not as it is, but as we wish it to be: a world organized around us and our desires, the perfect environment in which we can be left at peace to be ourselves and to follow our own good or evil purposes.
Lies are a desperately destructive force in human life. When they take the form of private fantasy, they rob us of our ability to deal truthfully with the outside world; but when lies go public, when an entire social group replaces reality with untruth, then the consequences are deadly. Sometimes, indeed, they can be literally deadly: Lies can kill. Lies work only when they remain unexposed. Once truth is allowed out, once reality is let in, then the lie just vanishes; the whole world of falsehood just crashes to the ground. And if the lie is to be maintained intact, then anything which speaks the truth has to be got rid of.
Totalitarian societies, dishonest businesses, abusive human relationships—they all depend on the exclusion of truth and truth-speakers, making sure that what really is the case isn’t allowed to come to light. Lies only work when they aren’t shown up for what they are; and that’s why lies always breed more lies, as we try to protect the world we’ve invented from being exposed.
At the heart of the story of the passion, therefore, is the confrontation of truth and falsehood. Why does Christ die? Why is he suppressed, cast out and finally silenced by death? Because he speaks the truth. He dies because in him there is spoken the truth of the human condition. He is the truth. In his person, as the one who he is, as the one who does what he does and says what he says, he announces the truth of the world, and thereby exposes its untruth. He shows up human falsehood in all its depravity. And he does so, not as a relatively truthful human person, nor even as a prophet inspired to declare what is hidden, but as God himself.