“I do believe; help my unbelief.”
This cry from the father of the mute, demon-possessed boy is in some way the genuine condition of the hearts of all who believe in and follow Christ. There are areas in our lives in which we know the truth of God and believe that truth is sufficient and efficient to accomplish transformation, but that confidence in God wavers.
The root of that wavering is that we really don't believe the promises of God. What we need, John Piper suggests, is faith in future grace. That is, we need faith to believe that as God has given past grace to provide spiritual life and sustenance, so He will give future grace that will equip us to adequately battle the sins of unbelief in its various forms — sins like anxiety, pride, misplaced shame, impatience, covetousness, bitterness, despondency, and lust.
This new book, Battling Unbelief, is a shortened version of his book Future Grace. The latter book provides more Biblical foundations for his reasoning, and then applies truth to a number of areas of sin. This book is a compilation of those chapters on the various sins.
What is future grace, and why do we need it?
Being satisfied with all that God promises to be for us in Jesus Christ is the essence of faith in future grace.…Sin has power because of the promises it makes to us.…No one sins out of duty. We sin because we believe the deceitful promises that sin makes.…Battling unbelief and fighting for faith in future grace means that we fight fire with fire. We throw against the promises of sin the promises of God. We take hold of some great promise God made about our future and say to a particular sin, "Match that!" In this way we do what Paul says in Romans 8:13, "By the Spirit…put to death the deeds of the body." [pp. 15-16]
Like Respectable Sins, which I was reading at the same time as this book (which was actually a good thing to do, as the messages are very similar, though Piper has more Biblical content and Bridges is more readable), Battling Unbelief is a book that I will come to again and again to help me in my battle with the flesh.
No comments:
Post a Comment