How People Change 1

So instead of filling up my facebook page with quotes from this book, I thought I would place my notes, that I have to keep for class anyway, on my blog. That way, the 1 or 2 of you who actually care can read it, and the rest of the facebook world doesn't have to ;)

This book is by Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp. I want to highlight everything! It's so good! I'm wishing I could read it more slowly and really chew on it. But I think keeping these notes and blogging about it will help some. And I'm asking you to join me because I think this chewing is good for all of our souls.

With that said, I will do a different post for each chapter. Typically, these will be done a little bit slower, but I just finished chapter 4, so we're gonna do 4 posts today! Happy chewing!

Chapter 1: The Gospel Gap

The gospel gap is understanding past forgiveness and future hope but not applying the gospel to the here and now of present day.

3 Kinds of Blindness

1.     Blindness of identity

“…if who I am in Christ does not shape the way I think about myself and the things I face, then I will live out of some other identity” (5).

“For too many of us, our sense of identity is more rooted in our performance than it is in God’s grace” (5).

2.     Blindness to God’s provision

“God’s provision for a godly life now is literally Christ Himself! He has given us Himself so that we can be like Him” (5).

3.     Blindness to God’s process

“He will do whatever H needs to produce holiness in us” (6).

What Fills the Gap?

“The gospel gap in many of our lives doesn’t stay empty either. If we do not live with a gospel-shaped, Christ-confident, and change-committed Christianity, that hole will get filled with other things. These things may seem plausible and even biblical, but they will be missing the identity-provision-process core that is meant to fill every believer” (6).

“Whenever we are missing the message of Christ’s indwelling work to progressively transform us, the hole will be filled by a Christian lifestyle that focuses more on externals than on the heart” (7).

Christian Externalism: Things that Fill the Gap

1. Formalism- blind to the seriousness of my spiritual condition & constant need for God’s grace to rescue me

2. Legalism- ignores the depth of our inability to earn God’s favor

3. Mysticism

4. Activism- “Whenever you believe that the evil outside you is greater than the evil inside you, a heartfelt pursuit of Christ will be replaced by a zealous fighting of the ‘evil’ around you. A celebration of the grace that rescues you from your own sin will be replaced by a crusade to rescue the church from the ills of the surrounding culture” (9).

5. Biblicism- theological expert but no life change

6. Psychology-ism- “But whenever you view the sin of another against you as a greater problem than your own sin, you will tend to seek Christ as your therapist more than you seek Him as your Savior. Christianity becomes more a pursuit of healing than a pursuit of godliness. The gospel is reduced to the healing of emotional needs” (10).

7. Social-ism – fellowship in body of Christ replaces dependence on communion with Christ

Why Are These Replacements So Attractive?

“Perhaps postmodernism and sexual immorality are not the greatest threats to the church of Christ in our day. Perhaps we are in more danger from the subtle lies that flow from subtle shifts in how we understand the gospel. We have not forsaken the faith, but we may have redefined it in ways that are fundamentally different from the gospel laid out in Scripture” (11).

“When the gospel is reduced to a catalog of isms where I choose the one most attractive and comfortable for me, I can participate extensively in Christianity without much personal sacrifice, and with my self, unchallenged, at the center of it all” (11).

“To the degree that you forget you are a sinner, you will underestimate your daily need for Christ and the relationships in His body that are His tools of change” (12).

What Should Fill the Gap?

Christ and the gospel!!

Five Gospel Perspectives

1.     The extent and gravity of our sin

2.     The centrality of the heart

3.     The present benefits of Christ (Gal 2:20)

4.     God’s call to growth and change (2 Peter 1:4)

5.     A lifestyle of repentance and faith (Titus 2:11-13)