It’s so easy to cash in these chips on my shoulders
So easy to loose this old tongue like a tiger
It’s easy to let all this bitterness smolder
Just to hide it away like a cigarette lighter

It’s easy to curse and to hurt and to hinder
It’s easy to not have the heart to remember
That I am a priest and a prince in the Kingdom of God

I’ve got voices that scream in my head like a siren
Fears that I feel in the night when I sleep
Stupid choices I made when I played in the mire
Like a kid in the mud on some dirty blind street

I’ve got sorrow to spare, I’ve got loneliness too
I’ve got blood on these hands that hold on to the truth
That I am a priest and a prince in the Kingdom of God

I swore on the Bible not to tell a lie
But I’ve lied and lied
And I crossed my heart and I hoped to die
And I’ve died and died

But if it’s true that you gathered my sin in your hand
And you cast it as far as the east is from the west
If it’s true that you put on the flesh of a man
And you walked in my shoes through the shadow of death

If it’s true that you dwell in the halls of my heart
Then I’m not just a fool with a fancy guitar
No, I am a priest and a prince in the Kingdom of God

Though no one could have known all of this at the time, Jesus was the priest who became the sacrifice, the king who took on the form of a servant, the prophet who himself was the Word of God. He was Immanuel, God with us-Son of God, Son of Man.

But the death and resurrection of Jesus only makes sense through the lens of his birth. God’s eternal Son, who was present at creation when God made man in his likeness, humbled himself and took on flesh, born in the like rss of man. The Maker knitted him together in Mary’s womb, fearfully and wonderfully forming each tin part in the depths o her waters. God saw his unformed body. Every day ordained for him was recorded in his Father’s book of life before a single one had come to pass.

And now he has come.

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

What defense do I have but to flee? Not to flee from the enemy, but to the protection of the King? I flee to the one whose victory is sure, whose strength is perfect, whose promise is unbreakable, whose words are immutable and eternal. When I hide in the wings of my redeemer, the arrows of the enemy clatter to the ground, powerless. If my strength is not my own, if my righteousness is Christ’s, my darkness only makes his light more lovely. Satan might as well be accusing the shadows in a Rembrandt of ruining the masterpiece. God bends even our sin to the service of his glory. This, I’m convinced, confounds the principalities of evil.

I told Jamie after that dark drive home from the studio that I realised a few things about myself. First, I remembered for the thousandth time that I need the gospel. I need to preach it to myself daily. My sin-oh the bliss of this glorious thought-my sin not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord, oh my soul. Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our LORD! This central truth of the gospel is also one of the hardest ones to remember-not just to remember, but to believe.

…No man, when he comes to die, will ever say “I spoke too much of the grace of God.” Let Satan accuse me of that. I welcome it.

-Andrew Peterson, Behold the Lamb of God, p. xvii

You’re glorifying something when you find it beautiful for what it is in itself. Its beauty compels you to adore it, to have your imagination captured by it. This happened to me with Mozart. I listened to Mozart to get an A in music appreciation in college. I had to get good grades to get a good job, so in other words, I listened to Mozart to make money. But today I am quite willing to spend money just to listen to Mozart, not because it’s useful to me anymore but because it’s beautiful in itself. It’s no longer a means to an end.

And when it’s a person you find beautiful in that way, you want to serve them unconditionally. When you say, “I’ll serve, as long as I’m getting benefits from it,” that’s not actually serving people; it’s serving yourself through them. That’s not circling them, orbiting around them; it’s using them, getting them to orbit around you.

-Tim Keller, p.6 King’s Cross

I try to pacify thee by abstaining from future sin,

But teach me that I cannot satisfy thy law,

that this effort is a resting in my righteousness,

that only Christ’s righteousness,

read made, already finished,

is fit for that purpose;

that thy chastising me for my sin

is not that I should try to reform, but only

that I may be more humbled, afflicted, and

separated from sin, by being reconciled,

and made righteous in Christ by faith;

that a sense of my sufficiency and ability in him

is one means of my being immovable;

that I can never be so resting on my own faith,

but by trusting in thee as my only support, by faith,

that if I cast away my faith I cast away thee,

for by faith I apprehend thee,

and as thou art very precious,

so is my faith very precious to me;

that I fall short of the purity thou requirest,

because in thinking I am holy

I do not seek holiness,

or, believing I am impotent, I do no more.

Humble me for not being as holy as I should be,

or as holy as I might be through Christ,

for thou art all,

and to posses thee is to posses all.

But to make the creature something

is to make it stand between thee and me,

so that I do not walk humbly and holily.

Lord, forgive me for this.

Bloodlines Documentary with John Piper from Crossway on Vimeo.

“In those days, I knew I could not preach. But I knew that this is the kind of preaching I wanted to hear — and if a miracle happened, and I ever became a preacher, the kind I wanted to do. The expository kind. The articulate kind. The coherent kind. The clear kind. The shove-your-face-in-the-text kind. The iron-clad-argument-from-conjunctions kind. The blow-the-gloom-of-ignorance-and-doubt-away kind. The no-nonsense-utterly-realistic-tell-it-like-it-is kind.”

John Piper on John Stott’s preaching.

Sound doctrine is so important. But we can never settle for merely knowing doctrine. God has given us his Holy Spirit, and he invites us to ask to be continually filled with his Spirit afresh so that doctrine becomes the living story of God’s great love for us. So that it melts our hearts. So that this truth sets us on fire with love for the Savior who loved us first. The glorious truth of God’s love for us in the giving of his Son isn’t something we can grasp through mere knowledge or bigger books. We need the power of God’s Holy Spirit to give us “strength to comprehend” how big and wide an ddeep God’s love for us is (Ephesians 18-19).

Joshua Harris, Dug Down Deep, p.191