Nurturing Faith Through Family Devotions and Grace

Family devotions are an essential feature of raising a family. I know that's complicated and difficult with school and after school, and so on. We raised our children in Britain, and our children were not sent to post-school activities like every day of the week. So, at least six of the seven days of the week, we sat around a table and ate dinner together. [00:05:37]

We would eat, we would talk, we would ask the children about their day. I would read some portion of scripture, ask for prayer requests, and different stages in their growth and development from little children to teenagers, you know, and awkward moments and stuff. You know, we took turns to pray, and I usually closed. [00:06:22]

It's creating an atmosphere in your family where talking about Christian things, talking about scripture, talking about prayer requests is natural and not forced. So there was constant communication about, you know, if there was a problem, just well, let's pray about it, and encouraging the children to think in terms of a spiritual mindedness. [00:07:44]

I would encourage that college student to turn toward the scriptures. The reading of God's word, study of God's word shows us that God is a speaking God who primarily is not revealing himself through visual arts. He's a speaking God, and his word is true. The character and the nature and purposes of God are found in the word of God. [00:08:51]

I think it's very important to preach the gospel to yourself every day to remind yourself every day, every morning, nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling. That there's absolutely nothing that I can do to improve my status of justification, that I'm justified by faith alone in Christ alone. [00:10:25]

We are saved by grace alone through faith alone, but that faith is never alone. It is always accompanied by works, and therefore that godly sorrow for sin can never be such as to undermine the very nature of our acceptance with God, of our justification. [00:11:46]

To be in Christ, first of all, means that we have a relationship with Christ, a saving relationship with Christ, and are brought into union and communion with him in such a way that as we are in Christ, what is true of Christ becomes true of us, that his grace and his resources become our experience in possession. [00:12:55]

The life of Christ is now in us by virtue of our being in Christ, and the fact of the matter is, and Christ is in us. So it's a double union, if you will. My entire life is now lived for Christ, but the life that I live is lived by virtue of being in Christ and his grace, his sufficiency. [00:13:48]

I take the classic Augustinian Calvinist interpretation that this is the second half of Romans seven is a description of a believer caught in the tension between the now and the not yet, wrestling daily with the fact that we are Christians but we continue to sin. The good that I would, I do not. [00:16:55]

The fact is that that language coincides remarkably closely to my experience of what it is to wrestle with sin every day, and I can't imagine different language that would better describe that. You know, I would add to that just, you know, context is an important key in interpretation. [00:18:46]

The issue is right now, this moment, are you saved or are you not saved? That's the issue. I think there are some people who cannot pinpoint exactly when they were converted. For one reason, they were sitting under such shallow preaching they weren't receiving enough of the truth to actually have a strong sense of evaluating their own experience. [00:21:00]

True saving faith is you come to the end of yourself, and that Christ begins, and you are under the authority of Christ, and you are now stepping out of the world and stepping out of the slave market of sin, and you are now following Christ by putting one foot in front of another. [00:30:11]