Renewal in the Church

I've been reading "Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal" by Richard Lovelace. I picked it up because Tim Keller quotes Lovelace quite a bit, and I guess that was reason enough for me.

I am only about a hundred pages into it, with three hundred more to go, but it has been incredible. It would take me pages and pages to summarize it and share all of my thoughts, and maybe someday I'll do that, but I just wanted to share a little bit that I read tonight.

"Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. ... Many have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification, in the Augustinian manner, drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequence of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther's platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.

"In order for a pure and lasting work of spiritual renewal to take place within the church, multitudes within it must be led to build their lives on this foundation. This means that they must be conducted into the light of a full conscious awareness of God's holiness, the depth of their sin and the sufficiency of the atoning work of Christ for their acceptance with God, not just at the outset of their Christian lives but in every succeeding day."

That last paragraph resonates with me, as just on this past Sunday night I spoke to 30 young men with as much passion and persuasion as I could muster about building their lives on this foundation. Reading this today only reinforced just how crucial this truth is for the Church.

Reading that last sentence, that "they must be conducted into the light of a full conscious awareness of God's holiness, the depth of their sin and the sufficiency of the atoning work of Christ for their acceptance with God," I felt that I would be happy if my life was spent doing that very thing, and maybe starting to set the foundation for a true, deep, powerful renewal of God's Church.