Hitting the Refresh Button

Excerpts from Tullian Tchividjian post:  What To Preach To Yourself Everyday

Because we are so naturally prone to look at ourselves and our performance more than we do to Christ and his performance, we need constant reminders of the gospel.

If we’re supposed to preach the gospel to ourselves everyday—what’s the actual content of that message? What is it exactly that I need to keep reminding myself of?

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It’s been widely accepted that in the original language of Greek, Ephesians 1:3-14 is one long sentence. Paul becomes so overwhelmed by the sheer greatness and immensity and size and sweetness of God’s amazing grace, that he doesn’t even take a breath. He writes in a state of controlled ecstasy. And at the heart of his elation is the idea of “union with Christ.” We have been blessed, he writes, “in Christ with every spiritual blessing” (1:3): we’ve been chosen (v. 4), graced (v. 6), redeemed (v. 7), reconciled (v. 10), destined (v. 11), and sealed forever (v. 13). The everything we need and long for, Paul says, we already possess if we are in Christ. He has already sweepingly secured all that our hearts deeply crave.

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The hard work of Christian growth, therefore, is to think less of me and my performance and more of Jesus and his performance for me. Ironically, when we focus mostly on our need to get better we actually get worse. We become neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with my effort over God’s effort for me makes me increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective.

You could state it this way: Sanctification is the daily hard work of going back to the reality of our justification–receiving Christ’s words, “It is finished” into new and deeper parts of our being every day, into our rebellious regions of unbelief.  It’s going back to the certainty of our objectively secured pardon in Christ and hitting the refresh button a thousand times a day. Or, as Martin Luther so aptly put it in his Lectures on Romans, “To progress is always to begin again.” Real spiritual progress,  in other words, requires a daily going backwards.

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Christian growth, in other words, does not happen first by behaving better, but believing better–believing in bigger, deeper, brighter ways what Christ has already secured for sinners.

Preach that to yourself everyday and you’ll increasingly experience the scandalous freedom that Jesus paid so dearly to secure for you.