I received an email today concerning a new book written by R.C. Sproul, Jr. It is entitled Believing God: 12 Biblical Promises Christians Struggle to Accept. You can read the first chapter by going here. I found this paragraph to be particularly compelling:
Our problem in the evangelical church isn’t, I believe, that we aren’t trained well enough to grasp the hard teachings of the Bible, but that we are too worldly to believe the plain promises of the Bible. The difficulty isn’t that the Bible is esoteric, but that it is profligate. The problem isn’t that God speaks with a forked tongue, but that He speaks such incredible promises that we find them to be less than credible. The answer isn’t to run from what God speaks, but to run to it. Thus, Paul makes perspicuous what he hopes for Timothy, and for us: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16).
Later he states:
If you’re like me, you probably spend far more time daydreaming about what it might be like to win the lottery than you do wondering what it might be like if you took enormous strides in your sanctification, if you became a hero of the faith, if you better reflected the glory of Jesus in all that you do. If we spent more time entering into the kind of anguish the apostle Paul goes through in Romans 7—“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. . . . Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (vv. 19, 24)—then perhaps we would rejoice when confronted with this sure promise from God. All Scripture is able to make us complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
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