Living in Peace, Joy, Faith, and Love

"Hebrews 4 talks about the rest of God. We enter into a rest. We may not, as Hebrew 4 indicates, it's something we have to make sure that we enter into the rest of God, the rest that God has provided. It talks about Sabbath in connection with rest, and that's essentially the point of the Sabbath is to cease from your own deeds." [00:09:22]

"Sabbath really means that you rest in the goodness of God, you trust him and you know, perhaps that there are many Sabbaths discussed in the scriptures. There is a Sabbath year, and the whole point of the Sabbath year was to trust God, to let his provision be there, to provide for you." [00:10:23]

"Joy is a pervasive and firmly established sense of well-being. It's a pervasive sense of well-being. Peace is rest in goodness. It has to do fundamentally with that posture of the will. Joy is not so much a posture of the will; it is a condition of the person with a certain feeling tone." [00:12:32]

"Joy is consistent with pain. Joy is consistent with suffering. Pleasure isn't. Pleasure is a feeling; joy is a condition. There are some feelings associated with it, as with peace, but again these are conditions of the self, not feelings. Peace, joy, hope—what am I saying? This is what we aim at." [00:15:49]

"Faith is readiness to act as if the goodness presupposed in hope is real. Faith is readiness to act as if the goodness presupposed in hope is real and reliable. And here there's a lot of scripture we could work with, but you begin with faith by hearing a good word." [00:19:06]

"Faith is not opposed to knowledge; it is something that leads to knowledge on the one hand and something that rests on knowledge on the other. But it does presuppose the readiness to act as if the goodness that you're hoping in is true, and that's a matter of degree." [00:20:32]

"Love is actually, I think, a kind of comprehensive thing that includes much of the others. I think First Corinthians 13 tells you that story. I mean, Paul in First Corinthians 13 just talks about love, but then when you get to looking at it, you find almost everything else there." [00:23:09]

"Love is engagement of the will for what is good. It goes beyond faith, but faith works by love. How does faith work by love? Well, faith is readiness to act as if the goodness presupposed in hope is real. Now then, when we get to love, we're not just ready; we're acting." [00:23:30]

"Discipleship involves learning to be like him and so they watched him, and he taught, and then one day he said, 'Now you do it.' Right, that's what he said, wasn't it? And now you're doing it. He sent them out, and he told them to preach. What did they preach, by the way?" [00:42:41]

"Discipleship is learning how to do what Jesus did in the way he did it by being with him. See what else we've got here. So, three main aspects of discipleship. The most important one in terms of progress is learning to do as he did and what he taught." [00:49:33]

"We learned to do the things that Jesus did and taught. Of course, some of the things he did, we can't do. That's okay. Most of them we can. We can take on his character and begin to exercise power of the kingdom of God in ways that won't hurt us or hurt other people." [00:50:40]

"Plan disciplines to put on new bowels, guts. This is gut stuff where your actions come from. And I give you here the references to II Peter where we're going to come back to that now because that's such an important passage. Then Colossians really, 12 through 17, put on bowels of mercies." [00:39:28]