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Amazing Grace 43 sages more clearly shaped his thinking of the Christian life than Paul’s testimony of grace in the Christian life in 2 Corinthians 12:7–10. A thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. The Christian life is not comfortable. God makes us no promises to remove difficult circumstances, or alleviate our pains, or protect us from suffering, but he does promise sufficient grace for all our wants and needs. In his pain, Paul learned there is a full supply of grace for all God’s chil- dren. This is not merely adequate grace, but all-sufficient grace. No matter how large and daunting the circumstance or need, grace is always larger and stronger and more fully sufficient to meet each battle or trial in the Christian life. Deeply moved by Paul’s words, Newton not surprisingly wrote multiple hymns on grace, including one titled “My Grace Is Sufficient for Thee.” In it he elaborates further on the perspective-altering power of God’s sufficient grace in light of the pains and struggles of the Christian life. The hymn opens with two verses of violent, descriptive words to recreate Paul’s des- peration. If “Amazing Grace” gives us a macro-look at grace and the Chris- tian life, “My Grace Is Sufficient for Thee” is a micro-look into how grace gets applied to the warfare in the Christian life. Oppress’d with unbelief and sin, Fightings without, and fears within; While earth and hell, with force combin’d, Assault and terrify my mind: What strength have I against such foes, Such hosts and legions to oppose? Alas! I tremble, faint, and fall; Lord, save me, or I give up all.
44 NE W TON ON T HE CHR IS T I A N L IF E Paul faced physical pain and outward oppression in his ministry, but here Newton applies the passage to the violent spiritual assaults against temptations, indwelling sin, the flesh, unbelief, the world, and a host of demonic foes. All the Christian’s allied enemies crash on him at once. He trembles, he faints, and he falls to his knees. The combined force of the enemies quickly overwhelms the internal supplies of the Christian. In des- peration, Newton cries out for deliverance. Thus sorely prest, I sought the Lord, To give me some sweet, cheering word; Again I sought, and yet again; I waited long, but not in vain. Oh! ’twas a cheering word indeed! Exactly suited to my need; “Sufficient for thee is my grace, Thy weakness my great pow’r displays.” The answer comes, but not immediately. And when it does arrive, the answer is not an alleviation of suffering, but the promise of all-sufficient grace to endure with joy. When sufficient grace breaks in, the entire mood of the hymn changes, even as the battles rage on. Notice how the hymn concludes with the mood-altering effect of this “awakening” to the suffi- ciency of God’s grace. Now I despond and mourn no more, I welcome all I fear’d before; Though weak, I’m strong; though troubled, blest; For Christ’s own pow’r shall on me rest. My grace would soon exhausted be, But his is boundless as the sea; Then let me boast with holy Paul, That I am nothing, Christ is all. 21
Only all-sufficient grace can account for the change of tone in this hymn. Grace alone is powerful enough to comfort Newton in his darkest trial, under the most persistent pain, and under attack on all fronts. God’s 21 W, 3:449–50. Amazing Grace 45 solution to trials may not always be an escape from circumstances, but may be a stable and ever-present response from God to those who ask. My grace is sufficient for you. “Such an assurance was more valuable than the deliverance he sought could be.” 22
“I am nothing, Christ is all.” The all-sufficient grace of God provides us the context for discovering our insufficiencies. Grace welcomes us to look into our emptiness and personal weakness because our strength and security is outside of us, in God’s all-sufficient grace. Our owning of per- sonal weakness is one of the results of the active presence of grace. And our weakness is how we broadcast the grace of God to others. Look closely and you’ll notice something curious in 2 Corinthians 12:9. Red-letter Bibles print this verse in blood-red text. “My grace is suffi- cient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness,” is a phrase from the lips of the Savior to Paul, pushing us closer to the heart of Newton’s theology, and closer to the heart of this book. No Such “Thing” as Grace The absence of the word grace from my book title and subtitle is not acci- dental. By personifying grace, “Amazing Grace” can be somewhat mislead- ing to modern readers. It is certainly not wrong to put verbs after grace (e.g., Titus 2:11). Grace saves wretches. Grace searches out lost sinners. Grace removes spiritual blindness and gives spiritual sight. Grace teaches us to fear God. Grace relieves fear. But in our modern culture, where grace has become a synonym for kindness, “Amazing Grace” becomes a sort of hymn to the transforming power of niceness or, a little better, grace becomes abstracted divine benevolence. In either case, grace is depersonalized. This misunderstanding of grace has led Sinclair Ferguson to go so far as to say there actually is no such thing as grace. 23
It has led Michael Horton to declare that grace is “not a third thing or substance mediating between God and sinners, but is Jesus Christ in redeeming action.” 24
Their point is the same. We must resist the temptation to morph grace into spiritual currency or some abstracted spiritual power that mysteriously ebbs and 22 W, 2:316. 23 “Grace is not a ‘thing.’ It is not a substance that can be measured or a commodity to be distributed. It is ‘the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 13:14). In essence, it is Jesus Himself” (Sinclair B. Ferguson, By Grace Alone: How the Grace of God Amazes Me [Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust, 2010], xv). 24 Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 267–68. 46 NE W TON ON T HE CHR IS T I A N L IF E flows. Grace is not dished out in spiritual gold coins of merit (a serious me- dieval Roman Catholic error confronted in the Reformation). No. Thinking of grace as spiritual currency is mistaken. To say there is no such thing as grace means that all the grace we have and can ever hope to have—all the sovereign grace, all the all-sufficient grace—is bound up in the favor of the Father and in our union with the Son. If you have Christ, you have all of Christ, and to have all of Christ is to have free access to Christ’s all-sufficient grace. Grace is not a gate to fence us back from Christ. Grace is not a substitute for Christ. Grace does not stand between me and Christ. Rather, says Calvin, “All graces are bestowed on us through Christ.” 25
Grace is shorthand for the full and free access we have to all the merits and power and promises to be found in the person of our Savior (John 1:16–17; Eph. 2:7; 1 Cor. 1:4; 2 Cor. 8:9; 2 Tim. 2:1). Repeatedly, Newton accents “the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” Grace is a stream from Christ, the fountain of all grace, he writes. 26
The “water of life” (Rev. 22:17) “stands for the communication of every grace from Jesus Christ. He is the fountain (John 7:37–39). [The outpouring of grace] is com- pared to water, for it is plenty. There is abundance of grace—a fountain, a river, an ocean (Isa. 44:3).” 27
“For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace,” writes the apostle John (John 1:16). “All the streams of grace flow from Christ, the fountain,” Newton concludes. 28
In a letter to his eminent friend Hannah More, Newton wrote: When we understand what the Scripture teaches of the person, love, and offices of Christ, the necessity and final causes of his humiliation unto death, and feel our own need of such a Savior, we then know him to be the light, the sun of the world and of the soul, the source of all spiritual light, life, comfort and influence; having access to God by him, and receiving out of his fullness grace for grace. 29
And thus, “we are gradually prepared to live more out of ourselves, and to 25 John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, trans. John Owen (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1853), 357. 26 W, 1:417; 2:574; 3:20; 6:253. 27 John Newton, 365 Days with Newton, ed. Marylynn Rouse (Leominster, UK: Day One, 2006), 122. Here I use the Logos software pagination. 28 W, 1:417. To be fair, Paul sometimes speaks of grace ( χάρις) without mentioning Christ. In these cases he appears to be speaking of grace as a mobilizing force or a spiritual gift for certain tasks (see Rom. 1:5; 12:3; 15:15; 1 Cor. 3:10; 15:10; 2 Cor. 9:8; Gal. 2:9; Eph. 3:7–8; Phil. 1:7). But ultimately, all the grace that gifts or mobilizes is a grace purchased in Christ and distributed by him (Eph. 4:7–8). 29 Letters (Bull 1869), 350. Amazing Grace 47 derive all our sufficiency of every kind from Jesus, the fountain of grace.” 30
Such dependence on Christ empowers us: “Oh, it is a great thing to be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus!” (2 Tim. 2:1). 31
In whatever ways our modern culture hears Newton’s hymn as an ab- stracted and depersonalized divine blessing, his intent is clear. Christ “is the Fountain, the Sun, the Treasury of all grace.” 32
When Newton speaks of grace, he is speaking of Christ in union with the believer. Newton’s grace is ever “My grace,” a sovereign grace, all-sufficient grace, alone-sufficient grace that flows freely and fully from the person of Jesus Christ. “By nature we are separated from the divine life, as branches broken off, withered and fruitless,” Newton writes. “But grace, through faith, unites us to Christ the living Vine, from whom, as the root of all fullness, a constant supply of sap and influence is derived into each of his mystical branches, enabling them to bring forth fruit unto God, and to persevere and abound therein.” 33
A life in union with Christ is “the life of grace.” 34 In our abiding union with Christ we find the context of the Christian life. Grace not only connects us to Christ; grace is the daily motivation for us to press closer toward Christ, to “be daily hungering and thirsting after him, and daily receiving from his fullness, even grace for grace; that you may rejoice in his all-sufficiency, may taste his love in every dispensation.” 35
Amazing Grace, Amazing Christ, Smoking Flax Discovering the amazingness of grace requires that we focus on the amaz- ingness of Christ in the theology and life of Newton. All we have is Christ. Separated from him, there is no saving or sanctifying grace for the Chris- tian life. United to Christ, there is full and free access to the full riches of Christ, who is the fountain of all grace. Newton expressed this union per- haps most fully and beautifully in his sermon on Matthew 11:27. The great God is pleased to manifest himself in Christ, as the God of grace. This grace is manifold, pardoning, converting, restoring, perse- vering grace, bestowed upon the miserable and worthless. Grace finds the 30 W, 1:430–31. 31 W, 2:105. 32 365 Days with Newton, 236. 33 W, 1:322. 34 W, 4:333. 35 W, 6:47. 48 NE W TON ON T HE CHR IS T I A N L IF E sinner in a hopeless, helpless state, sitting in darkness, and in the shadow of death. Grace pardons the guilt, cleanses the pollution, and subdues the power of sin. Grace sustains the bruised reed, binds up the broken heart, and cherishes the smoking flax into a flame. Grace restores the soul when wandering, revives it when fainting, heals it when wounded, upholds it when ready to fall, teaches it to fight, goes before it in the battle, and at last makes it more than conqueror over all opposition, and then bestows a crown of everlasting life. But all this grace is established and displayed by covenant in the man Christ Jesus, and without respect to him as living, dying, rising, reigning, and interceding in the behalf of sinners, would never have been known. 36
Grace is not currency dispensed from an impersonal, computerized ATM. Grace is deeply personal, it is glue, securing the branch of our Chris- tian life into the trunk of Christ’s all-sufficiency. Grace binds us to the per- son of Christ, to his vital life, and to the full spectrum of his all-sufficient benefits. Before we learn from Newton about the common challenges of the Christian life, before we study the particular blemishes of Christian character, before we study his instructions to those who are discouraged and depressed, before we see his balm for the pain and trials and the inse- curities Christians face, and before we can learn from him about trying to do business in the world, or about how to honor God in our marriages, or about how to deal with particular indwelling sins—before we look at any of these particulars, we must understand the root of all grace, Jesus Christ. 36 W, 2:442. WISDOM FROM THE PAST FOR LIFE IN THE PRESENT Other volumes in the Theologians on the Christian Life series Backmatter Ad for Edwards on the Christian Life BONHOEFFER PACKER
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on the Christian Life CHRISTIAN LIFE / PERSONAL GROWTH “Here is mastery! Reinke distills a vast flow of pure honey for the Christian heart. This is a book to read over and over again.” J. I. PACKER,
Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology, Regent College “ Newton on the Christian Life is a magnum opus. A bold project, beautifully done. You know about John Newton; now you can be pastored by him.” ED WELCH,
counselor and faculty member, The Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation “Linger long here. The depths and riches within these pages are truly rare, and answer what your soul most hungers for: life in Christ. I will be returning to this book many, many times over.” ANN VOSKAMP, New York Times best-selling author, One Thousand Gifts TONY REINKE is a former journalist who serves as a staff writer and researcher at desiringGod.org. He is the author of Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books and hosts the popular Ask Pastor John podcast. Reinke and his wife live in Minneapolis with their three children. The Theologians on the Christian Life series provides accessible introductions to the great teachers on the Christian life. WISDOM FROM THE PAST FOR LIFE IN THE PRESENT John Newton is famous for his legendary hymn “Amazing Grace.” Many have celebrated his dramatic conversion from a life in the slave trade to his eventual work to end it. But often overlooked are Newton’s forty years as a pastor ministering to parishioners and friends unsettled by the trials, doubts, and fears of life. Newton is perhaps the greatest pastoral letter writer in the history of the church. He took up his pen day after day to help others fix their eyes on Christ, which, he writes, is the underlying battle of the Christian life. Through a careful study of scores of letters, Tony Reinke brings together Newton’s brilliant vision of the Christian life in one accessible place. REINKE F O R E W O R D B Y J O H N P I P E R Yüklə 2,91 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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