Christ is more real and more sure than life itself.

Christians think they don't have idols. Reason being: we define it poorly. "I don't worship little wooden or metal objects" Yet let's examine what idolatry actually comes down to. Sin: “I want something contrary to God’s will.” Which ends up being: “I regard this thing as more desirable than obedience to God.” Deeper still: “In this moment, I am treating this created thing as more worthy of trust, love, fear, or allegiance than God.” We have such an idol problem in our hearts that one of the most central New Covenant promises is to cleanse us from our idolatry. Ezekiel 36:25-27 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. John actually says: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” That is the thunderclap exhortation that closes his 1st epistle. It almost seems to come out of nowhere. Like Columbo turning around at the door with one final line that cuts through all the charades and pretenses. But it is not random at all. It reads almost like John assumes we understand: Therefore, because of everything I have just told you, little children, keep yourselves from idols. It functions as a kind of summary exhortation. And notice the key components. 1. “Little children” John is speaking to believers. That matters enormously because John does not say: “If you still struggle with idols, perhaps you are not really children of God.” He says: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” Their identity is established before the exhortation is given. This is characteristic of John’s reasoning throughout the epistle. He grounds obedience, perseverance, love, and warfare against sin in what God has already made them. They are children of God. They know Him. They have eternal life. They are in His Son. They have been born of God. And therefore they are exhorted to live in a way consistent with that identity. The exhortation does not create the identity. The identity grounds the exhortation. 2. “Keep yourselves from idols” This assumes that idolatry remains a real danger from which believers must actively guard themselves. John does not treat idolatry as a category rendered irrelevant by conversion. He warns actual children of God about it. 3. That means the New Covenant promise that God will cleanse His people from their idols cannot mean that every remaining idolatrous inclination is instantaneously eradicated at the new birth. If that were the case, John’s closing exhortation would make very little sense. Instead, John treats idolatry the same way he treats sin throughout the letter. Sin is condemned. Sin remains present. Believers are commanded not to sin. And when they do sin, they are driven back to Christ. “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” John never solves the tension by weakening either side. He does not say sin does not matter because we are secure. And he does not say the presence of remaining sin means our identity as children is perpetually uncertain. He gives us both. You are children of God. Therefore, fight sin. You have eternal life in the Son. Therefore, keep yourselves from idols. You have been born of God. Therefore, do not make peace with what contradicts your new identity. This makes the ending especially powerful because immediately before the command John says that we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ, and that He is the true God and eternal life. Then: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” In other words: You know the true God. You are in the true God. You possess eternal life in His Son. Therefore, guard yourselves from every rival. The command is not a threat hanging over an uncertain identity. It is the exhortation of a father to children whose identity has already been established. And that is John from beginning to end. You have been born of God. You are His children. Therefore live as children, not in order to become what you are not, but because by grace that is what you truly are.

As hard as killing sin is for the natural man who is literally chained and enslaved to it, imagine trying to kill it “by the Spirit” without “the Spirit.” Whether this be a man who doesn’t have the Spirit altogether, or a man who possesses the Spirit but attempts to mortify sin independently of Him, rather than abiding in the Vine. It’s a cosmic impossibility. Ezekiel 36:27 “And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”

13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. This verse is straightforward. The mile-high version is: kill sin or it will kill you (John Owen). But notice the key phrase that makes this different from the way we would ordinarily understand a typical directive: “by the Spirit.” When you ask someone to do something, you don’t normally ask them to do it “by the Spirit.” If we are preoccupied with the “kill sin” but we miss “by the Spirit,” this verse has actually been emptied of that which makes it distinctly Christian. In fact, what would prevent a Muslim from doing this? Killing what the Bible calls sin. They could do so inadvertently. In fact, many cultures do without having ever read the Bible. That would generally be called something like “moral improvement,” “living a good life,” or just “be ethical.” That’s not the thrust of what Paul is saying. In fact, Paul is operating within union theology. He has already laid the groundwork for what union with Christ is, particularly in Romans 6–8. When he gives this imperative, he is fully relying on you to have understood what he just explained. So if you don’t understand that, you cannot simply skip to “kill sin” and presume you’ve understood Paul’s command. You don’t even know what “by the Spirit” means. It would be like a doctor telling you to get rid of your cancer, but you missed the entire treatment plan and the mechanics of “how.” So the first key point: what does “by the Spirit” mean? And whatever you would have that mean, I guarantee you it is not merely changing your behavior. Will it involve behavioral change? Emphatically yes. But Paul explicitly said “by the Spirit.” So unless you’re changing your behavior “by the Spirit,” you are absolutely not doing what Paul is commanding you to do. So again, what is “by the Spirit”? We’ve established that this is not something as basic and natural as changing your toothpaste brand. We’ve established that it is distinctly Christian. We’ve established that it relates to Paul’s union theology. But what is “by the Spirit”? I don’t know that I even fully grasp this, even having been a Christian for 15+ years. I would begin by at least saying “by the Spirit” involves some of the following: 1. It is grounded in union with Christ, which we apprehend by faith and trust in Him. We have a sense of belonging to Christ, trust, and love for Christ. To some degree, we understand that we are in Him, and He is in us. 2. We understand that while we have the Spirit of Christ, we are not the Spirit of Christ, and the Spirit is a person. We also understand that the Spirit is not a force. This isn’t Star Wars. We don’t wield the Spirit. We don’t access the Spirit by ritual or mantra. We participate with Him. He is personally and distinctly operative in our lives. This is a dynamic, relational movement that includes both us and the Spirit Himself. 3. What Paul is asking us to do is supernatural. It is beyond the natural. Paul is commanding us to act within a metaphysical transformation that has already begun in the believer and is continually advanced by the Spirit Himself. Therefore, “by the Spirit” is a supernatural process. This does not mean that every act of mortification must be accompanied by some extraordinary experience or conscious awareness of the Spirit’s activity. The supernatural work of the Spirit can operate through our ordinary, regenerated human faculties. 4. We can, by faith, aim to carry out what Paul is commanding. However, we remain causally dependent on God Himself from start to finish. We cannot generate this act independently of Him. Therefore, an attitude of prayer and dependence is implicit in the command. This is in no way the final, bounded, perfect description of what Paul means, but it reaches and strains to conceive of what Paul is commanding. If we brush past “by the Spirit,” we aren’t even engaging the command in its fullness. The entire movement and progression of sanctification hinges on this. Therefore, we must deeply press into what God means when He says “by the Spirit,” or what Christ means when He says “abide” or “apart from me you can do nothing.”

xitter.cf/B_A_Purtle/status/2103… “Do you desire Christ for Himself, as beauty is loved for itself?” — Thomas Watson (1620-1686) This is not natural. Christ is beautiful and desirable. Yet our natural mind and heart are hostile and bent inwards. The issue is not with Christ but with the desires of our hearts. If desire for Christ was natural in man as he is, then it would generally follow that we would observe a pattern of nearly all people desiring Him as people desire food. But such is not the case therefore the perversion of our hearts is manifestly demonstrated. John 8:42 "If God were your Father, you would love me" Parentage isn't established by child to parent but from parent to child. In John 8, Jesus establishes the causal chain of loving Him in sonship. In doing so He also reveals the binary categories of humanity, "of God" and "of the devil." It unavoidably follows that being of the devil makes one averse to God, and likewise being of God can only mean an affinity towards Him. It's super un-rocket-science-y The main takeaway is: Prayerful dependence on God. Whether someone is not in Christ, and supposing they hear with alarm, they should cry out to God for mercy. Or whether we are in Christ and realize the bankruptcy of our love for God, we cry in destitution asking to be made more like Christ. Only God can heal and restore us, making us human again.

Why are you a Christian? The answer matters. The NT and the entire canon, by and large, teach: If your ultimate "why" is predominantly anything other than a love relationship with God Himself, your faith is brittle. Worse, if this desire for God Himself is truly and completely absent, that calls into question whether what you possess is biblical faith at all. That is not to say faith doesn't begin primarily with "repent and believe in Christ for the forgiveness of sins." But every genuine beginning has the seed of this filial love, even when it is difficult to detect and the warning of hell or promise of eternal life is louder. There are other reasons people seek God and reconciliation, some good and some bad. My point is not that all other reasons are wrong or worthless. My point is that there is a reactor core, and the reactor core is God Himself and our desire for Him. All these other motivations can be sincerely held, falsely professed, or wrongly ordered. There are right reasons, wrong reasons, and right reasons held for the wrong reasons. These initial motivations, including warning and promise, continue and mature in the believer. But the ultimate "why" of the believer mirrors God's reason for our redemption: to magnify His glory and to share Himself with us. Our "why" is to glorify and enjoy God forever. How do we glorfiy God? By enjoying Him and obeying His commandments. Even more so, as John says, "His commandments are not burdensome." It is not at all the same thing to obey a command with resentment to the command. In fact resentment of the command reveals resentment to the Master. This can be absolute such as in the case of unbelievers, but in real believers its not absolute but partial. As we grow in Christ we resent His commands less and surrender to His Lordship more fully and as John says the commandments are less and less burdensome. Only God can change our hearts to progressively conform us to enjoy Him and His commandments. For God's children the story is simple. Garden: we walked with God. Fall: fracture and separation. Christ comes: reconciles us objectively on His cross and proclaims His Good News, and in time we believe, and begin to walk with Him in part and see in part. Glorification: we walk with God again in full and see in full. Or rather, God walks with us. Filial love and fellowship with God are the heart of Christianity.

C.S. Lewis' strongest argument against monergism takes about 30 seconds to break, Lewis: genuine love requires freedom. Lewis defines that freedom as the ability to go either right or wrong: if one is free to be good, one must also be free to be bad. But: God is love. God cannot cease to love or cease to be love. Yet God's love is not somehow less genuine because the contrary, ceasing to love, is impossible. Therefore, the ability to do otherwise cannot be what makes love genuine. And once that premise falls, there is no contradiction in God sovereignly regenerating a sinner, giving him a new heart, eyes to see, ears to hear, and the indestructible life of Christ, such that faith and love infallibly follow from the new nature God has given him. Thus love (and faith) are no less genuine merely because God in His grace has made their opposite impossible.

Every true thing brings light. Every untrue thing brings darkness. More severely: every true thing belongs to and tends toward life; every untrue thing belongs to and tends toward death. This holds universally, down to the smallest truth and smallest falsehood, though the magnitude, manner, timing, and providential consequences are ordinarily hidden from us.

I hardly ever hear this verse preached, and the architecture of Jesus sovereignly giving life according to His own will is likewise seldom emphasized: “For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will.” It does not say that the Son waits for man to “trigger salvation” through some human act, uttering a Christian phrase or making what appears to be an outward profession of faith, as though man’s declaration places the King under obligation. Remember: many will say, “Lord, Lord, did we not...?” Sounds like they had the profession part, yet the answer they receive is one of the most dreadful in all of Scripture. But that makes sense considering: “The Son gives life to whom He will.” The initiative, authority, and power are in the hand and heart of the King. Salvation is given, not earned. Nothing we do or say places Christ under obligation as though our act stood outside His grace and compelled His hand. Even saying, “But I believe by grace through faith,” does not turn faith into a lever over the King. Faith receives Christ. It does not rule Him. Don't trust in your faith. Trust Christ. 🎶Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling; Naked, come to Thee for dress; Helpless, look to Thee for grace; Foul, I to the fountain fly; Wash me, Savior, or I die.🎵

I despise the Christian phrase “in the will of God” when it means some hidden life-path we are supposed to discern. There are two categories: Preceptive will: what God has revealed, His commands and how we ought to live. Decretive will: what God has ordained will actually happen. If “in God’s will” means walking according to His revealed commands, fine. But that is usually not how the phrase is used. It is often treated as a secret third category: an unwritten personal blueprint we are somehow expected to discover. That is the part I reject. Jonah makes the distinction almost comically clear. Jonah violated God’s preceptive will while perfectly fulfilling God’s decretive will. His disobedience did not derail God’s plan. It was encompassed within it, and the story unfolded exactly according to God’s wise and holy purpose.

“Decrees to permit” is the clearest formulation. God does not sin. He does not morally approve of evil as evil. But He decrees to permit it. And you cannot escape this simply by denying exhaustive sovereignty. Before God created anything, He knew infallibly the entire history of the world He was creating. Every event, every human decision, every sin, every act of redemption, from beginning to end. Yet He freely created this world. Had He willed to actualize a different history, He was under no obligation to create this one. He could have created differently or not created at all. Therefore, nothing that occurs in this world can be something God discovered after creating it, something that surprised Him, or something that slipped into history contrary to His decision to actualize this creation. The world that actually exists is the world God knowingly and intentionally chose to create, including every evil He chose to permit within it. That does not mean God wills evil as evil or shares the sinner’s wicked intention. The sinner intends the evil as evil. God intends to permit that evil within a providential order directed toward His own holy purposes. Those are entirely different moral intentions. And Christianity makes this clearest at the very center of history. The greatest evil ever committed, the rejection and crucifixion of the perfectly righteous Son of God, was not an accident that God merely managed to salvage afterward. Christ was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. The supreme manifestation of God’s glory, Jesus Christ and His redemptive work, comes precisely through a world containing sin, judgment, mercy, sacrifice, resurrection, reconciliation, and redemption. So this is not a world God reluctantly found Himself governing after events escaped His control. This is the history He knowingly chose to actualize and through which He determined to reveal His glory most fully in Christ. Sin can therefore be contrary to God’s commands, contrary to His moral approval, and contrary to what He loves considered in itself, while never being contrary to His sovereign purpose. You cannot have a world in which something occurs that God decisively decreed would not occur. So “God decrees to permit” is not a contradiction in terms. It is precisely the distinction required by omniscience, intentional creation, divine holiness, and providence. It's easily seen in what happened to Christ. He was hated, betrayed, falsely accused, mocked, tortured, and crucified. Every one of those acts was wicked, and God hates wickedness. Yet none of them occurred outside His purpose. The very acts God condemned as evil in the men who committed them were acts He had sovereignly determined to permit and use to accomplish the most glorious act of redemption in history. What they intended for evil, God ordained toward an infinitely holy and beautiful end.

I hadn't really thought much on how Satan and the powers of darkness essentially force monergism before but I would reason this way: 1. Satan desires the destruction of humanity and possesses power far beyond ours. If God permitted him to exercise that power without restraint, no human being could withstand him indefinitely. 2. Yet humanity is not destroyed. 3. Therefore, Satan is restrained from accomplishing the full extent of his will. 4. God alone ultimately determines the limits within which Satan may act. 5. Therefore, our continued standing cannot ultimately be explained by our ability to withstand Satan, but by God’s decision not to permit Satan to overcome us. It must follow, at the decisive level, whether we stand is dependent upon God’s sovereign restraint, not autonomous human strength. This is easily seen in Peter and Judas. Satan demands to have Peter and sift him like wheat. Christ allows Peter to be violently tested, but He prevents the result Satan wants: “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.” Peter is shaken in the sieve, but Satan is not permitted to prove him chaff. With Judas, the opposite occurs. Satan enters him, and Jesus says, “What you are going to do, do quickly.” The decisive difference is not that Peter is stronger than Judas. Christ preserves Peter. Christ does not preserve Judas. In fact, He tells Judas to do what he is going to do quickly.

Prevenient grace is an empty invention designed to preserve a theological system. Dead men don’t rise. Blind men don’t see. Deaf men don’t hear. Lame men don’t walk. Lepers don’t cleanse themselves. All of these require a miracle. And that is precisely why prevenient grace does not actually solve the problem. If Christ universally removes every one of these incapacitating conditions by restoring sufficient ability to everyone, then the conditions themselves lose their explanatory force. You are effectively saying that man is dead, blind, deaf, lame, and unclean, except that every man has already been universally restored from the inability those descriptions are meant to convey. At that point, the language begins to collapse into abstraction. Man is totally unable, except actually... totally able? ...He theoretically would have been unable and it would have been so bad! But no one ever experiences that because Christ universally cured it. What point do the parabolic miracles and metaphorical teachings on sin and death even serve?