Notes on *Deeper*

[Editor’s note: Deeper is my favorite I’ve read this year. I found it profoundly encouraging, repeatedly leading me to worship.]

Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners, Dane Ortlund (Crossway, 2021)

Main Idea/Takeaway

The way that Christians grow- or progress in sanctification- is not by putting their heads to work, but by opening their hands to receive all that God is for us in Christ. We must keep our eyes on Jesus.

• "The basic point of this book is that change is a matter of going deeper. Some believers think change happens through outward improvement-behaving more and more in accord with some moral norm (the biblical law, or the commands of Jesus, or conscience, or whatever). Others chink change happens mainly through intellectual addition--understanding doctrine with greater breadth and precision. Others think it comes centrally through felt experience-  sensory increase as we worship God. My argument is that all three of these elements are included in healthy Christian development (and if any is missing, we are out of proportion and will not grow), but real growth transcends them all.Growing in Christ is not centrally improving or adding or experiencing but deepening. Implicit in the notion of deepening is that you already have what you need. Christian growth is bringing what you do and say and even feel into line with what, in fact, you already are." (16)

• " The primary emphasis I have wanted to give is that we grow specifically by going deeper into the gospel, into the love of Christ and our experienced union with him." (153)

• "My goal in this book has simply been to coach you into that single, simple, all-determining impulse of the heart: looking to Jesus. If you look to him, everything else is footnotes." (172)

• "This is a book with one point: Be astonished at the gracious heart of Jesus Christ, proven in his atoning work in the past and his endless intercession in the present. Receive his unutterable love for sinners and sufferers. Stop resisting. Let him draw near to you. Gaze upon him." (173)

Table of Contents

I. Jesus

II. Despair

III. Union

IV. Embrace 

V.  Acquittal 

VI. Honesty

VII. Pain 

VIII. Breathing 

IX. Supernaturalized 

Conclusion: What now?

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

I. Jesus

• "Let me suggest that you consider the possibility that your current mental idea of Jesus is the tip of the iceberg. That there are wondrous depths to him, realities about him, still awaiting your discovery." (22)

• "This supreme reign holds true not only for the cosmos and for world history but also for your own little life. He sees you. He knows you. Nothing is hid from his gaze. You will be judged one day not according to what was visible to others but according to what you really were and did." (24)

• "Have you reduced the Lord Jesus to a safe, containable, predictable Savior who pitches in and helps out your otherwise smoothly running existence? Have you treated what is spiritually nuclear as a double-A battery? Might one reason we stall out in our growth in Christ be that we have unwittingly domesticated the expansive authority and rule of Jesus Christ over all things?" (25)

• "And in our ongoing walk with the Lord now, do we functionally believe that the healthy Christian life is basically a matter of our efforts, baptized with a little extra push from Jesus?" (25)

• "Every human is five hundred denarii in debt. The point of the parable is that we tend to feel only fifty denarii in debt. The more obvious failures of a given culture sense their sinfulness more readily than others and are therefore readier and more eager for a deliverance that sweeps them up out of death with a full and total salvation." (27)

• "But if this is a Savior who draws near to us, who is repelled only by self-righteousness but never by acknowledged shame and weakness, there is no limit to just how deep a transformation is possible in us. It is at our point of deepest guilt and regret that his friendship embraces us most assuredly, most steadfastly." (28)

• "We will not grow in Christ if we view his presence and favor as a ticking clock, ready for an alarm to go off once we fail him enough. We can flourish into deeper health only as the truth settles over us that once Jesus has brought us to himself, he will never be looking for an off-ramp. He will stick by us to the end. In that knowledge we calm down and begin to flourish." (29)

• "Jesus is not bored in heaven. He is fully engaged on our behalf, as engaged as ever he was on earth. He is interceding for us. Why? Because we continue to sin as believers. If conversion so changed us that we never sinned again, we would not need Christ's intercessory work. We would only need his death and resurrection to pay for our pre-conversion sins. But he is a comprehensive Savior. His present intercessory work applies his past atoning work moment-by-moment before the Father as we move through life desiring to please the Lord but often failing." (31)

• "We will grow in Christ only as we recognize the ally Jesus Christ is to us, now in heaven. He did not die and rise again on our behalf back then only to stand now with arms crossed seeing how we'll do in response. He continues to work on our behalf-he goes "to the uttermost" for us--advocating for us when no one else will, not even we ourselves. He is more committed to your growth in him than you are." (31)

• "Our growth in Christ also draws strength from a vivid heart sense of his imminent return. It is hard to move forward in the Christian life if we allow ourselves to be lulled into the monotonous sense that this world will simply roll on forever as it currently is." (31)

• "He is the most open and accessible, the most peaceful and accommodating person in the universe. He is the gentlest, least abrasive person you will ever experience. Infinite strength, infinite meekness. Dazzlingly resplendent; endlessly calm." (32)

• "Peer down into the deepest recesses of Jesus Christ and there we find: gentleness and lowliness." (33)

• "What we must see is not only that Jesus is gentle toward you but that he is positively drawn toward you when you are most sure he doesn't want to be." (33)

• "Determine today, before God, through the Bible and good books explaining it, that you will spend the rest of your life wading into the unsearchable riches of the real Christ." (35)

II. Despair

• "Fallen human beings enter into joy only through the door of despair. Fullness can be had only through emptiness. That happens decisively at conversion, as we confess our hopelessly sinful predicament for the first time and collapse into the arms of Jesus, and then remains an ongoing rhythm throughout the Christian life. If you are not growing in Christ, one reason may be that you have drifted out of the salutary and healthy discipline of self-despair." (38)

• "Christian growth is, among other things, growth in sensing just how impoverished and powerless we are in our own strength- that is, just how hollow and futile our efforts to grow spiritually are on our own steam." (39)

• "The old British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones explains: "You will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner, because there is a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good terms with ourselves, and we can always put up a good case for ourselves." (40)

• "To the degree that we minimize the evil within, we lower the ceiling on how deeply we can grow. We take a painkiller and go to sleep when we think we have a headache; we undergo chemotherapy when we know we have a brain tumor. The severity of our condition dictates the depth and seriousness of the medicine we know we need. If you view your sinfulness as a bothersome headache more than a lethal cancer, you will see tepid growth, if any. You won't see yourself as needing to grow all that much." (40)

• "When we see how desperately sick we are and how profoundly short we fall of the glory for which God intended us, we have already taken the first decisive step in bridging that vast gulf between who we are and who we were made to be." (41)

• "The point in all this is chat we must come face-to-face with who we

  really are, left to our own steam. Christian salvation is not assistance.

  It is rescue. The gospel does not take our good and complete us with God's help; the gospel tells us we are dead and helpless, unable to contribute anything to our rescue but the sin that requires it. Christian salvation is not enhancing. It is resurrecting." (42)

• "You cannot feel the weight of your sinfulness strongly enough. I never met a deep Christian who did not have a correspondingly deep sense of his or her own natural desolation." (43)

• "The pattern of the Christian life is not a straight line up to resurrection existence but a curve down into death and thereby up into resurrection existence.? And one thing that means is that we go through life with an ever-deepening sense of how reprehensible, in ourselves, we really are." (44)

• "If you plunge down only a little into self-despair, you will rise only a little into joyous growth in Christ. "The index of the soundness of a man's faith in Christ," writes J. I. Packer, "is the genuineness of the self-despair from which it springs." (45)

• "Healthy despair is an intersection, not a highway; a gateway, not a pathway.

  We must go there. But we dare not stay there. The Bible teaches, rather, that each experience of despair is to melt us afresh into deeper fellowship with Jesus." (47)

• “As you despair of yourself agonizing over the desolation wrought by your failures, your weaknesses, your inadequacies- let that despair take you way down deep into honesty with yourself. For there you will find a friend, the living Lord Jesus himself, who will startle and surprise you with his gentle goodness as you leave Self behind, in repentance, and bank on him afresh, in faith.” (49)

III. Union

• "The old writer Jeremiah Burroughs put it this way: "From Christ as from a fountain sanctification flows into the souls of the saints: their sanctification comes not so much from their struggling, and endeavors, and vows, and resolutions, as it comes flowing to them from their union with him." (51-52)

• "When Jesus went down into the grave to die for our sins, we too went with him down into that grave to die to our sins." (52)

• "This fourth approach is "God in me." God does everything to save me, and then by his Holy Spirit (more on that in another chapter) he unites me spiritually to his Son. The result is that in our growth in holiness (as Edwards put it) "we are not merely passive in it, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest, but God does all, and we do all. . .. We are in different respects wholly passive and wholly active." This approach, in other words, holds together both human responsibility and divine sovereignty in how we move forward spiritually." (54)

• "Our Christian growth takes place in the sphere of a wonderful inevitability, even invincibility. I am united to Christ. I can never be disunited from him." (56)

• "The New Testament uses the language of union with Christ in basically two ways. We could call them the macro and the micro realities to union with Christ, or the cosmic and the intimate, or the federal and the personal." (57)

• "The alternative to being in Christ is to be in Adam. One or the other. No third option.

  Every human being alive today is either in Adam or in Christ. And that is the fundamental defining reality about each of us." (58)

• "To be united to Christ as your new federal head is to be placed in that new realm. If you are a Christian, you have been swept up by divine grace into the new order that the prophets foretold. The new creation has already begun to dawn." (59)

• "The glory of Christian redemption is that it is in union with Jesus that we are given back our true selves. We finally begin becoming who we were truly created to be." (61)

• "At this point you may be wondering how union with Christ fits with the other great and glorious pictures of our salvation- justification, adoption, and so on. The answer is that union with Christ is the umbrella doctrine within which every benefit of salvation is subsumed. When we are united to Christ, we get all these benefits." (62)

• "And union with Christ, the organic or spatial metaphor, is the master-picture. If you are in Christ, you get all these benefits." (63)

• "If you are in Christ, you have everything you need to grow. You are united to Christ: by the Holy Spirit, you are in him and he is in you. He is your federal head, and he is your intimate companion. You cannot lose. You are inexhaustibly rich." (64)

• "Every atom in the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most to the advantage of the Christian, every particle of air or every ray of the sun; so that he in the other world, when he comes to see it, shall sit and enjoy all this vast inheritance with surprising, amazing joy." (65)

• "Therefore: nothing can touch you that does not touch him. To get to

  you, every pain, every assault, every disappointment has to go through him. You are shielded by invincible love. Everything that washes into your life, no matter how hard, comes from and through the tender care of the friend of sinners. He himself feels your anguish even more deeply than you do, because you're one with him; and he mediates everything hard in your life through his love for you, because you're one with him. Picture yourself standing in a circle with an invisible but impenetrable wall surrounding you, a sphere of impregnability. But it's not a circle you're in. It's a person--the person. The one before whom John fell down as he grappled for words to describe what he was looking at as one whose "eyes were like a flame of fire ... and his voice was like the roar of many waters" (Rev. 1:14-15) has been made one with you. The might of heaven, the power that flung galaxies into existence, has swept you into himself." (66)

IV. Embrace 

• "What I want to say in this chapter is that the love of God is not something to see once and believe and then move beyond to other truths or strategies for growing in Christ. The love of God is what we feed on our whole lives long, wading ever more deeply into this endless ocean. And that feeding, that wading, is itself what fosters growth. We grow in Christ no further than we enjoy his embrace of us. His tender, mighty, irreversible embrace into his own divine heart." (70)

• "What exactly is Paul praying for? Not for greater obedience among the Ephesians, or that they would be more fruitful, or that false teaching would be stamped out, or that they would grow in doctrinal depth, or even for the spread of the gospel. All good things, things we should and must pray for. But here Paul prays that the Ephesians would be given supernatural power not power to perform miracles or walk on water or convert their neighbors, but power, such power, the kind that only God himself can give, power to know how much Jesus loves them. Not just to have the love of Christ. To know the love of Christ." (71)

• "Here in Ephesians 3, Paul is praying that believers would taste the love of Christ. Drink it down." (72)

• "The love of Christ is his settled, unflappable heart of affection for sinners and sufferers- and only sinners and sufferers. When Jesus loves, Jesus is Jesus." (72)

• "Paul is saying that the love of Christ is as expansive as God himself.

  We can underestimate it. We always do. We can never overestimate it. "His essence being love," Jonathan Edwards preached, "he is as it were an infinite ocean of love without shores and bottom, yea, and without a surface." (73)

• "And as this love of Christ becomes real to us not just something we assent to on paper, but vivid to us -we are, according to the Bible, "filled with all the fullness of God" (Eph. 3:19). With the possible exception of Colossians 2:9-10-_"in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him" -- this is, to me, the most astonishing claim in the Bible." (74)

• "Knowing Christ's love is the means, and being filled with divine fullness is the purpose. We are infused with divine plenitude, fullness, buoyancy, joy, as we experience the love of Christ. We don't go out and attain divine fullness. We receive it. This is the surprise of the Christian life. We get traction in our spiritual lives not centrally as we get down to work but as we open up our hands." (74)

• "But we cannot receive what God has to give when our fists are clenched and our eyes shut, concentrating on our own moral exertion. We need to open up our fists and our eyes and lift both heavenward to receive his love." (75)

• "And so what I want to say in this chapter is that your growth in Christ will go no further than your settledness, way down deep in your heart, that God loves you." (75)

• "So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more. Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from him; but if the heart be once much taken up with this the eminency of the Father's love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared unto him. ... If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will?" (76)

• "We tend to think we're in danger of overstating God's love for us as we receive it as his children. We hold back, not wanting to be too bold, careful to be sure we don't overdo it." (76)

• "We experience the love of God as we look at Jesus and God pours the Holy Spirit, who is himself divine love, into our felt experience." (77)

• "...affections. By that they meant the felt inner enjoyment of the heart, the soul throb that only God gives, the joyous calm that blankets those who look upon him.

  And as we see more clearly the second person of the Trinity_-who he is and what he has done--the third person of the Trinity creates in us an experience of divine love." (77)

• " But where do we look to see Jesus so that the Holy Spirit can be poured afresh into our actual experience? We open a Bible." (78)

• "It's precisely our messiness that makes Christ's love so surprising, so startling, so arresting and thereby so transforming." (79)

• "Your life doesn't disprove Christ's love; his life proves it." (80)

• "The wraparound category of your life is not your performance but God's love. The defining hallmark of your life is not your cleanness but his embrace." (83)

V.  Acquittal 

• "And in this book on sanctification, this chapter is on justification. Sanctification is lifelong, gradual growth in grace. Justification, however, is not a process but an event, a moment in time, the verdict of legal acquittal once and for all." (85)

• "...the process of sanctification is, in large part, fed by constant returning, ever more deeply, to the event of justification." (86)

• "We could put the point of this chapter in three sentences:

  1. Justification is outside-in, and we lose it if we make it inside-out.

  2. Sanctification is inside-out, and we lose it if we make it outside-in.

  3. And this inside-out sanctification is largely fed by daily appropriation of this outside-in justification." (86)

• "The great teachers of the past understood how heart-contrary we are to accepting wholesale the surprise of justification. This is why the Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne said, "For every one look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ." It's why John Newton said that a single view of Christ "will do you more good than poring over your own wounds for a month." (87)

• "Our growth in godliness, in other words, works in an inverse way to justification, both in how it works and in how it gets ruined. In our justification the verdict of legal acquittal must come wholly from heaven, landing on us as something earned by someone outside us, in no way helped out by our contribution. But that has to do with our standing. That is the objective result of the gospel. Sanctification, however, is change with regard to our walk, our personal holiness, the subjective result of the gospel. This must happen internally." (88)

• "Edward Fisher, in his famous Puritan treatise on sanctification, explained that external conformity to rules without an internal reality fueling it is akin to watering every part of a tree except its roots and expecting it to grow. The internal realities of the Christian are what define true growth in Christ." (90)

• "The gospel is what changes us, and only it can, because the gospel itself is telling us what is true of us before we ever begin to change, and no matter how slowly our change comes. (ln saying this I do not mean to collapse all that the gospel says into the one category of justification; the gospel is broader than justification, including other glorious doctrines such as adoption, reconciliation, redemption, and so on. But justification is the sharpest edge of the gospel because it is the doctrine where the sheer gratuity of the grace of the gospel stands forth most clearly.)" (91)

• "...in line with the broader point of this whole book: we grow by going deeper into the justification that forgave us in the first place." (91)

• "Richard Lovelace puts it in his classic work on spiritual renewal:

Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons--much less secure than non-Christians, because they have too much light to rest easily under the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have." (91)

• "Reformed stalwart Herman Bavinck defined real faith as a practical knowledge of the grace that God has revealed in Christ, a heartfelt trust that he has forgiven all our sins and accepted us as his children. For that reason this faith is not only needed at the beginning in justification, but it must also accompany the Christian throughout one's entire life, and also play a permanent and irreplaceable role in sanctification." (93)

• "Paul identified Peter's conduct as being out of step with the gospel (2:14) and in violation of the doctrine of justification by faith (2:16) because Peter had allowed the approval of people to erode his grasp of the approval that the gospel gives and the settled status that justification provides." (96)

• "What we all end to do is walk through life amassing a sense of r who we are as an aggregate of what we think everyone else think of us. We walk along, building a sense of self through all the feedback. pinging back at us. We don't even realize we're doing it. And when others are critical, or snub us, or ignore us, or ridicule us, that builds our sense of who we are. It inevitably shapes us. And so we muse constantly hold the gospel before our eyes. And as the gospel becomes real to us, the need for human approval loses its vice-like grip on our hearts, because we're no longer putting our heads down on our pillows at night medicating our sense of worth with human approval. The doctrine of justification frees us not only from the judgment of God in the future but also from the judgment of people in the present." (98)

• "Diagnostic questions to expose our idols are questions such as:

• What does my mind tend to drift back to when I lie awake in bed?

• What do I spend disposable income on?

• What in other people do I tend to envy?

• What is that one thing that, if God were to appear to me today and tell me I would never have it, would make life feel not worth living?

• If I'm married, what would my spouse say I tend to give myself to that makes him or her feel neglected?

• How would my heart--not my theology, but my heart--phrase the hymn, "When _________________it is well with my soul"?

• What do I find myself praying for that is nowhere promised in the Bible?" (100)

• "Every idol is man-made. Every false justification is generated by us. But God himself has come to us with a justification of his own doing. It is the atoning verdict of Jesus Christ. We can only receive it. To add to it is therefore to subtract from it. We simply breathe it in with a heart posture of trusting faith. And thereby God justifies us--God himself." (102)

• "Do you want to grow in Christ? Never graduate beyond the gospel. Move ever deeper into the gospel. The freeness of your outside-in justification is a critical ingredient to fostering your inside-out sanctification." (110)

VI. Honesty

• "I'd like to focus in this chapter on one particularly important teaching from the New Testament, the most important corporate reality for our growth in Christ: honesty." (112)

• "Walking in the light in this text is honesty with other Christians." (113)

• "Here is what I want to say in this chapter: You are restricting your growth if you do not move through life doing the painful, humiliating, liberating work of cheerfully bringing your failures out from the darkness of secrecy into the light of acknowledgment before a Christian brother or sister. In the darkness, your sins fester and grow in strength. In the light, they wither and die. Walking in the light, in other words, is honesty with God and others." (114)

• "Walking in the light breeds depth of communion with fellow Christians."(117)

• "The gospel answers that. If you are in Christ, heaven has bathed you.

  You have been rinsed clean and are now "un-dirty-able." It doesn't matter what you feel. That doesn't define you. Jesus was defiled to free you from your defiled status and your defiled feelings. That doesn't mean we will never battle feelings of defilement. But it does mean that one aspect of growing in Christ is bringing our subjective feelings of defilement into line with that objective, decisive, invincible, true-for-all-time-and-eternity cleansing in the blood of Christ." (122)

• "When you trust God enough to speak your sinfulness to another human, the channels of your heart are opened to feeling forgiven. This is because the same pride that stops us from confessing our sins to a brother or sister also hinders our felt belief in the gospel. Pride hinders fellowship both horizontally and vertically. Evading honesty before another Christian is more fundamentally a rejection of the gospel itself. Refusing to be honest with another is works righteousness in disguise; we are believing that we need to save face, to retain uprightness of appearance." (123)

VII. Pain 

• "Your natural instincts tell us that the way forward in the Christian life is by avoiding pain so that, undistracted, we can get down to the business at hand of growing in Christ. The New Testament tells us again and again, however, that pain is a means, not an obstacle, to deepening in Christian maturity." (125)

• "Misery and darkness and anguish and regret and shame and lament color all that we say, do, and think. The reality of nightmares shows that this pain and futility even reaches into our subconscious and our sleep. We can go nowhere to escape the futility and pain of life in this fallen world. This is true for all believers." (127)

• "Throughout the course of our discipleship to Christ we all need to build a deep and strong foundation of understanding how to process and even redeem the anguish of our lives. Without this foundation our growth in Christ will be severely limited." (128)

• "We who are honest with ourselves recognize how intractably entwined the vines of our hearts are with this world. That's not to say we should refuse to enjoy the good things of the world--a favorite meal, a beautiful sunset, the intimate pleasures of a spouse, gratification at a job well done. To resist such pleasures absolutely is, according to the apostles, demonic (1 Tim. 4:1-5). Rather, we should acknowledge that our hearts will latch on to anything in this world short of God himself and will seek to draw strength from that created thing instead of the Creator and his love.

  The biblical category for this perverse inclination of our hearts to look to the things of this world to quench our soul thirst is idolatry." (130)

• "When pain washes into our lives, we immediately, instinctively feel as if we are losing. Something is happening in the debit category. We are going backward. This is bad, we think. Understandably so. In the economy of the gospel, however, we are united to a Savior who was himself arrested, crucified, put in a grave, and left for dead, only to rise in a triumphant glory not possible apart from that death. Pain seeds glory?" (131)

• "When insults send us reeling backward, when life hurts, our eyes are being lifted off of the unstable things of the world onto the stable God of the Bible. We are being given back our true selves. We are being beckoned, as Lewis put it, "further up and further in.' When pain comes, it is not simply to hurt us, to teach us a lesson, to whip us into shape; it is from a tender Father, for our healing." (132)

• "When life hurts, we immediately find ourselves at an internal fork in the road. Either we take the road of cynicism, withdrawing from openheartedness with God and others, retreating into the felt safety of holding back our desires and longings, lest they get hurt again, or we press into greater depth with God than we have ever known." (132)

• "If you want to be a solid, weighty, radiant old man or woman someday, let the pain in your life force you to believe your own theology. Let it propel you into deeper fellowship with Christ than ever before. Don't let your heart dry up. He is in your pain. He is refining you. All that you will lose, Sibbes reminds us, is the dross of Self and misery that in your deepest heart you want to shed anyway." (133)

• "Let yourself cry as you grow. Don't stuff your emotions down. Growing in Christ isn't all smiles and laughter. Let your tears, and the wounds they reflect, take you deeper with Christ than you could ever otherwise go." (135)

• "Right now, every one of us who is in Christ is either killing sin or being killed by sin. Either getting stronger or getting weaker. If you think you're coasting, you're actually going backward. There's no cruise-control spiritually. It may feel as if you're currently in neutral, but our hearts are like gardens: if we aren't proactively rooting out the weeds, the weeds are growing, even if we don't notice." (135)

• "The trouble is that the whole message of the Bible is that if we're going to add a cherry of self-contribution on top of Christ's work to really be okay, we have to provide the whole sundae. All or nothing. And the tragedy is that though we assent theologically to the truth that we can't add to Christ's work, we try to put ourselves emotionally at ease by helping the Lord out a bit. Yet adding something to seal the deal is precisely what will create uneasiness about whether the deal ever really is sealed." (138)

• “Killing sin is a strange battle because it happens by looking away from the sin. By "looking away" I don't mean emptying our minds and trying to create a mental vacuum. I mean looking at Jesus Christ.” (139)

• "We feed sin by coddling it, pining after it, daydreaming about it, giving vent to it. We suffocate sin by redirecting our gaze to Christ.

  When I say "redirecting our gaze," I mean looking on him with "the eyes of your hearts" (Eph. 1:18)." (139)

• "But when our hearts redirect their gaze to the Jesus of the Bible in all his glorious gentleness and dazzling love, sin gets starved and begins to wilt. As we enjoy the truths this book has been reflecting on--realities such as our union with Christ and his unshakable embrace of us and God's irreversible acquittal of us--then, right then, spiritual life and vigor begin to have the ascendancy, and the grip of sin loosens."(140)

VIII. Breathing 

• "I want to consider just two ordinary, predictable, wondrous, vital practices: Bible reading and prayer. And the way to think about these two practices is by the metaphor of breathing. Reading the Bible is inhaling. Praying is exhaling." (143)

• "The Christian life-our growth in Christ--is nothing other than the lifelong deconstruction of what we naturally think and assume and the reconstruction of truth through the Bible." (145)

• “In this shifty, uncertain world, God has given us actual words, Concrete, unmoving, fixed words. We can go to the rock of Scripture amid the shifting sands of this life. Your Bible is going to have the same words tomorrow that it does today. Friends can't provide that-they will move in and out of your life, loyal today but absent tomorrow. Parents and their counsel will die. Your pastor will not always be available to take your call. The counselor who has given you such sage instruction will one day retire, or maybe you'll move out of state. But you can roll out of bed tomorrow morning and, whatever stressors slide uncomfortably across your mental horizon as you groan with the anxieties of the day, your friend the Bible is unfailingly steady. It lies there, awaiting opening, eager to steady you amid all the unanswered questions before you that day. It will give you what you need and not evade you. Our truest wisdom and only safety is to build our lives on its words (Matt. 7:24-27)” (146)

• "In fact, we should not be saying "it" but "he." Through Scripture God himself addresses us." (146)

• "Read the Bible asking not mainly whom to imitate and how to live but what it shows us about a God who loves to save and about sinners who need saving." (149)

• "The right way to read the Bible is the gospel approach. This means we read every passage as somehow contributing to the single, overarching storyline of Scripture, which culminates in Jesus." (150)

• "Make the Bible your central daily ritual. Make it your habit without which you have not lived a normal day." (152)

• "As we now think about prayer, here is what we are doing; we are reflecting on the way our souls must go out to God in Christ to desire, to long for, to receive, to dwell in, to thank him for his endless love. The gospel comes to us in the Scriptures, and in prayer we receive and enjoy it?" (153)

• "...to connect prayer with Scripture reading is simply to acknowledge that God is a real person with whom believers have an actual, moment-by-moment relationship. The Bible is God's speaking to us; prayer is our speaking to him. If we do not pray, we do not believe God is an actual person. We may say we do. But we don't really. If we do not pray, we actually think he is an impersonal force of some kind, a kind of Platonic ideal, distant and removed, powerful but abstract. We don't view him as a Father." (153)

• "Move through your day praying. Let God be your moment-by-moment Father. Hear his voice in Scripture in the morning, and turn that Scripture into prayer and then let that time with him, that back-and-forth communion, send you off into your day communing with him all day long." (155)

• “So I propose to you, as you grow in Christ, that you form the vital habit of making the book of Psalms your lifelong companion. Befriend the Psalms deeply. Never go too long without making them your own prayers. They give voice, sacred voice, to every circumstance, every emotion, every distress we walk through in this fallen wilderness of a world.” (155)

IX. Supernaturalized 

• "The natural inertia of all our Christian ministry and living is to proceed out of our own resources, asking God to add his blessing to our efforts. It's how we all tend to operate without even realizing it, even as born again believers. But it is backward." (159)

• "The Father ordains salvation, the Son accomplishes salvation, and the Spirit applies salvation. In other words, there is no Christian life without the Spirit. The Christian life is purely theoretical if there is no operation of the Spirit. Everything that we experience of God is the working of the Spirit. That is true at conversion, as the Spirit opens our eyes to our sin and Christ's saving offer. And it is true of our growth." (160)

• "The Holy Spirit is how God gets inside you. If you are a Christian, you are now permanently indwelt by the Spirit, and if you are permanently ind welt by the Spirit, then you have been supernaturalized." (160)

• "...the Spirit is the continuation, so to speak, of Jesus himself. Jesus spoke of his departure being necessary so that the Spirit could come John 16:7; cf. 14:12-17). In the Spirit, we have something more wonderful than those who spoke and ate with Jesus himself. And this Spirit's arrival marks the dawning new creation." (163)

• "To grow as a disciple of Christ is not adding Christ to your life but collapsing into Christ as your life. He's not a new top priority, competing with the other claims of reputation, finances, and sexual gratification. He is asking you to embrace the freefall of total abandon to his purpose in your life." (166)

• "In brief: the Spirit effectually causes us to behold Christ in such a way that transforms us." (169)

• "Be so radically Spirit-led that you are therefore radically Christ-centered.

  Christ and Spirit, the incarnate Son and the indwelling Spirit--this is your double gift." (169)

Conclusion: What now?

• "The final conclusion, the deepest secret, to growing in Christ is this: look to him. Set your gaze upon him. Abide in him, hour by hour. Draw strength from his love. He is a person, not a concept. Become personally acquainted with him, ever more deeply as the years roll by." (171)

• "I do not have nine things to say. I have one thing to say. Look to Christ. You will grow in Christ as you direct your gaze to Christ. If you take your eyes off of Jesus Christ and direct your gaze to your own growth, you will prevent the very growth you desire." (171)

• "I have asked the question: what must happen in the individual human heart, most fundamentally, most deeply, for a man or woman to get traction and grow? And the message of this book is that the way we grow is receiving the heartful love of Jesus. The gospel of grace not only gets us in but moves us along." (173)

• "Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief? Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams. Feel his all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in his almighty arms." (174)

Notable Content

• Seven facets of Christ (23-34)

  1. Ruling

  2. Saving

  3. Befriending

  4. Persevering

  5. Interceding

  6. Returning

  7. Tenderness

• Four different ways Christians understand growth: (53)

1. God then me

2. God not me

3. God plus me

4. God in me

• Nine common but wrong ways to read the Bible: (150)

1. The warm-fuzzies approach - reading the Bible for a glowing, subjective experience of God, ignited by the words of the text, whether we understand what they actually mean or not. Result: frothy reading.

2. The grumpy approach - reading the Bible out of nothing but a vague sense that we're supposed to, to get God off our backs for the day. Result: resentful reading.

3. The gold-mine approach- reading the Bible as a vast, cavernous, dark mine, in which one occasionally stumbles upon a nugget of inspiration. Result: confused reading.

4. The hero approach -reading the Bible as a moral hall of fame that gives us one example after another of heroic spiritual giants to emulate. Result: despairing reading.

5. The rules approach -reading the Bible on the lookout for commands to obey to subtly reinforce a sense of personal superiority.Result: Pharisaical reading.

6. The Indiana Jones approach -reading the Bible as an ancient document about events in the Middle East a few thousand years ago that are irrelevant to my life today. Result: bored reading.

7. The magic-eight-ball approach_-reading the Bible as a road map to tell me where to work, whom to marry, and what car to buy. Result: anxious reading.

8. The Aesop's Fables approach- reading the Bible as a loose collection of nice stories strung together independently, each with a nice moral at end. Result: disconnected reading.

9. The doctrine approach reading the Bible as a theological repository to plunder for ammunition for our next theology debate at Starbucks. Result: cold reading.

• What did the Old Testament anticipate taking place at the end of the world? (161)

1. The ruinous fall into sin at Eden wrought by Adam would be undone

2. God would make a new creation.

3. Sin and evil would be judged.

4. God would triumph once and for all over his enemies.

5. God's people would be vindicated.

6. The nations of the world would flock to Jerusalem

7. Messiah would come.

8. The latter-day kingdom would be launched.

9. The dead would be raised.