Change Can Actually Happen

I’m still working on my endorsement of Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson’s wonderful book, Counsel from the Cross: Connecting Broken People to the Love of Christ, and I wanted to share a few more nuggets with you.

Here’s what hooked me in the first few pages:

“So why add one more counseling book to your local bookstore’s shelves? Because we want to lay before you a provocative claim: the cross of Christ and the gospel that proclaims it really is “the power of God for salvation–comprehensive rescue–to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). In that cross lie both the power to liberate hearts that have been caught in seemingly unbreakable cycles of defeat and to instill hope that change can actually happen, in ourselves, in our relationships, in those whom we love fiercely and resent intensely at the same time.

The cross declares that we are loved with an intensity that defies our capacity to comprehend, not because we are intrinsically lovable but because God is intrinsically love. And these twin messages of the cross–brutal honesty about our guilt and impotence, with the glorious assurance or our welcome by the Father in his Beloved Son–pack divine power, through the Holy Spirit of God, to pry our affections loose from enslaving patterns of self-defense and self-indulgence and to set our hearts free to run–by grace alone, through faith alone–toward the goal: “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).” (emphasis added)

Don’t you want to pre-order this book today?

I am going to bed now with a heart prepared for corporate worship tomorrow because I am remembering that, “When God the Creator sent his eternal Son as Redeemer, he set in motion a new creation power that will eventually eradicate both the sin-twisted self-centeredness of our hearts and the sin-infected wounds that we have inflicted on one another.”

Amen & Amen!

G’nite friends,
Tara B.