Wise Words
This page contains links, essays, poetry, and longer articles by past and present writers who point us to the power of Christ and His Gospel for change. Here is grace that fires the heart and animates our days, bringing love for God and His world. Enjoy and thank God for the creativity and wisdom He gives through Jesus, the Great Artist and Wonderful Counselor; the Word made flesh who “plays in ten thousand places.”
Christ Our Life
by Tim Keller
[The following link is a message on Colossians 3:1-14 from Tim Keller, Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. Keller does a great job showing how the central dynamic of our hearts is really one of worship, having to do with this question: “Who or what gives me true meaning? What is it that I believe I cannot live without?” Our tendency to worship idols remains even after conversion. So where is hope to be found? In Christ alone, who is our Life!]
Listen at: Christ Our Life
The Expulsive Power of A New Affection
Thomas Chalmers
(1780-1847)
[The following excerpt from this 18th century Scottish Divine is from a discourse on the power of the Gospel to drive out the idols of our hearts with a new affection, Christ Himself. Chalmers knew well that it is only the kindness of God, revealed in the person and work of Christ, which leads us to repentance.]
The heart cannot be prevailed upon to part with the world, by a simple act of resignation…In a word, if the way to disengage the heart from the positive love of one great and ascendant object, is to fasten it in positive love to another…To obliterate all our present affections by simply expunging them, and so as to leave the seat of them unoccupied, would be to destroy the old character, and to substitute no new character in its place. But when they take their departure upon the ingress of other visitors; when they resign their sway to the power and the predominance of new affections….we see how, in fullest accordance with the mechanism of the heart, a great moral revolution may be made to take place upon it.
It is there, and there only, where God stands revealed as an object of confidence to sinners and where our desire after Him is not chilled into apathy, by that barrier of human guilt which intercepts every approach that is not made to Him through the appointed Mediator. (emphasis added) It is the bringing in of this better hope, whereby we draw nigh unto God - and to live without hope, is to live without God; and if the heart be without God, then world will then have all the ascendancy. It is God apprehended by the believer as God in Christ, who alone can dispost it from this ascendancy. It is when He stands dismantled of the terrors which belong to Him as an offended lawgiver and when we are enabled by faith, which is His own gift, to see His glory in the face of Jesus Christ, and to hear His beseeching voice, as it protests good will to men, and entreats the return of all who will to a full pardon and a gracious acceptance-it is then, that a love paramount to the love of the world, and at length expulsive of it, first arises in the regenerated bosom. It is when released from the spirit of bondage with which love cannot dwell, and when admitted into the number of God’s children through the faith that is in Christ Jesus, the spirit of adoption is poured upon us - it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection, is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires, in the only way in which deliverance is possible. (emphasis added) And that faith which is revealed to us from heaven, as indispensable to a sinner’s justification in the sight of God, is also the instrument of the greatest of all moral and spiritual achievements on a nature dead to the influence, and beyond the reach of every other application.
This, we trust, will explain the operation of that charm which accompanies the effectual preaching of the gospel…
Thus it is, that the freer the Gospel, the more sanctifying is the Gospel; and the more it is received as a doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according to godliness.(emphasis added) This is one of the secrets of the Christian life…On the tenure of “Do this and live,” a spirit of fearfulness is sure to enter; and the jealousies of a legal bargain chase away all confidence from the intercourse between God and man; and the creature striving to be square and even with his Creator, is, in fact, pursuing all the while his own selfishness, instead of God’s glory; and with all the conformities which he labours to accomplish, the soul of obedience is not there, the mind is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed under such an economy ever can be. It is only when, as in the Gospel, acceptance is bestowed as a present, without money and without price, that the security which man feels in God is placed beyond the reach of disturbance - or, that he can repose in Him, as one friend reposes in another - or, that any liberal and generous understanding can be established betwixt them - the one party rejoicing over the other to do him good - the other finding that the truest gladness of his heart lies in the impulse of a gratitude, by which it is awakened to the charms of a new moral existence.
Salvation by grace - salvation by free grace - salvation not of works, but according to the mercy of God - salvation on such a footing is not more indispensable to the deliverance of our persons from the hand of justice, than it is to the deliverance of our hearts from the chill and the weight of ungodliness. Retain a single shred or fragment of legality with the Gospel, and we raise a topic of distrust between man and God. We take away from the power of the Gospel to melt and to conciliate. For this purpose, the freer it is, the better it is. That very peculiarity which so many dread as the germ of antinomianism, is, in fact, the germ of a new spirit, and a new inclination against it. Along with the light of a free Gospel, does there enter the love of the Gospel, which, in proportion as we impair the freeness, we are sure to chase away. And never does the sinner find within himself so mighty a moral transformation, as when under the belief that he is saved by grace, he feels constrained thereby to offer his heart a devoted thing, and to deny ungodliness. To do any work in the best manner, we should make use of the fittest tools for it.
As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Dráw Fláme’
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844-1889)
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
The Therapeutic Gospel
by David Powlison
“In his chapter entitled “The Grand Inquisitor,” Fyodor Dostoevsky imagines Jesus returning to sixteenth century Spain (The Brothers Karamazov, II:5:v). But Jesus is not welcomed by church authorities. The cardinal of Seville, head of the Inquisition, arrests and imprisons Jesus, condemning him to die. Why? The church has shifted course… The most obvious, instinctual felt needs of twenty-first century, middle-class Americans are different from the felt needs that Dostoevsky tapped into. We take food supply and political stability for granted. We find our miracle-substitute in the wonders of technology….[We say], I want to experience a sense of personal significance and meaningfulness, to be successful in my career, to know my life matters, to have an impact; I want to gain self-esteem, to affirm that I am okay, to be able to assert my opinions and desires; I want to be entertained, to feel pleasure in the endless stream of performances that delight my eyes and tickle my ears…
(read full article)
Dealing With Past Sexual Abuse
by Dan Allender
“…the first task in entering the battle is facing the fact that a battle exists. Facing the reality of past abuse is a process. It does not happen quickly or in one climactic moment of honesty. It usually occurs over a lengthy time, during which the past abuse is seen in light of current choices of flight or fight….” (read article)