is God safe?

In C.S. Lewis's book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, one of the children ask Mr. and Mrs. Beaver about Aslan the Lion.

"Is he - quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."
"That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs. Beaver. "If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, their either braver than most or just plain silly."
"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king, I tell you."

God isn't safe - but he's good.

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social disaster..

Without a feel for the social dimension of believing, the church is like a person paralyzed from the neck down – quite insensible to the further damage being inflicted on her.
Os Guinness

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the life pursuit?

Dear Friend, what are you doing? What have you been doing? And what do you contemplate doing? I should like every young man here just to look at himself. Here you are, young man. You certainly were not sent into this world merely to wear a coat and to stand so many feet in your stockings! You must have been sent here with some intention. A noble creature like man—and man is a noble creature as compared with the animal creation—is surely made for something. What were you made for? Not merely to enjoy yourself. That cannot be! You certainly are not “a butterfly born in a bower,” neither were you made to be creation’s blot and blank.

Neither can you have been created to do mischief. It were an evil thing for you to be a mere serpent in the world, to creep in the grass and wound the traveler. No, you must be made for something. What is that something? Are you answering your end? We were made for God’s glory. Nothing short of this is worthy of immortal beings! Have we sought that glory? Are we seeking it now? If not, I commend to your consideration this thought, that as the ships go on their business, so ought men to live with a fixed and worthy purpose. I would say this, not only to young men, but with greater earnestness, still, to men who may have wasted 40 years.

O, how could I dare to stand before this congregation tonight and have to say, “Friends, I have had no objective. I have lived in this world for myself, alone. I have had no grand purpose before me”? I should be utterly ashamed if that were the fact. And if any man is obliged to feel that his purpose was such that he dares not acknowledge it, or that he has only existed to make so much money, or gain a position in life, or to enjoy himself, but he has never purposed to serve his God, I would say to him, Wake up, wake up, I pray you, to a noble purpose, worthy of a man! May God, the ever-blessed Spirit, set this before you in the light of eternity and in the light of Jesus’ dying love! And may you be awakened to solemn, earnest purpose and pursuit.
CH Spurgeon

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a prayer that we know well..

Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples."And he said to them, "When you pray, say:
"Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread,
and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation."
Luke 11:1-4

I have comforted myself with this fact: that when my prayers have been feeble or wandering, or even prevented from any proper attention, but I have prayed the Lord’s Prayer, I have covered all the essentials.
Martin Lloyd-Jones

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in my place..

He stood in our place and purchased salvation.
We stand in his place and publish salvation.

... the primary function of the concept [penal subsitution] is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that, on the one hand, no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise, and, on the other hand, that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus, who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due.
JI Packer

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divine humility..

It is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble high-minded readers of scripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it "unmindful of His glory's diminution." Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.
CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain

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definite atonement..

A lot of the staying-power of limited atonement, is because it supplies the 'l' in the English acronym – tulip – which gives us the five so-called points of Calvinism. The five points of Calvinism are, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints.

Don Carson, however, calls limited atonement, a defensive, restricted expression, and he prefers definite atonement. He prefers atonement, and so did Broughton-Knox, and so does Jim Packer. And a writer called Roger Nicole, who says in one of his articles,

'limited atonement seems to take away from the beauty, glory and fullness of the work of Christ, so I will gladly send the tulips flying. I am not Dutch. I am Swiss, and I do not care about tulips. I want to say definite atonement.'

For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
2 Corinthians 5:14-15

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