Busy

"Tomorrow I plan to work, work from early until late. In fact I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer."

    -Martin Luther

 

"Sometimes we think we are too busy to pray. That is a great mistake, for praying is a saving of time."
    -Charles H. Spurgeon

Given to Me what I was not.

“This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ’s, and the righteousness of Christ not Christ’s but ours.  He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it; and he has taken our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them.”

“Learn Christ and him crucified.  Learn to pray to him and, despairing of yourself, say, ‘Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am thy sin.  Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine.  Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not.’”

Martin Luther, quoted in J. I. Packer and Mark Dever, In My Place Condemned He Stood

This is that mystery is a post from: Ray Ortlund

A Wicked Harlot Through and Through

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5:1 ESV

I am reading a very good book on the Reformation by Michael Reeves called The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

Here is a quote about Martin Luther and when he first believed in Justification by Faith alone (paraphrasing Luther's The Freedom of a Christian):

“At the heart.... is a story of a king who marries a prostitute, Luther’s allegory for the marriage of King Jesus and the wicked sinner. When they marry, the prostitute becomes, by status, a queen. It is not that she made her behavior queenly and so won the right to the king’s hand. She was and is a wicked harlot through and through. However, when the king made his marriage vow, her status changed. Thus she is, simultaneously, a prostitute at heart and a queen by status. In just the same way, Luther saw that the sinner, on accepting Christ’s promise in the gospel, is simultaneously a sinner at heart and righteous by status. What has happened is the ‘joyful exchange’ in which all that she has (her sin) she gives to him, and all that he has (his righteousness, blessedness, life and glory) he gives to her. Thus she can confidently display ‘her sins in the face of death and hell and say, “If I have sinned, yet my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned, and all his is mine and all mine is his”.’ This was Luther’s understanding of ‘justification by faith alone’, and it is in that security, he argued, that the harlot actually then starts to become queenly at heart.”