Recently sent by a friend —

Our deeply held conviction is that everything in Scripture is for the purpose of bringing us into a deeper and closer relationship with the Lord, so that we may truly know Him and be conformed to His image and that He may truly know us, as He indicates to be so essential in Matthew 7 and as Paul says in Galatians.

The goal on every level is to surrender completely to Him, so that His lordship may be complete.

This is the purpose of all the truths of God’s Word.

The problem for many Christians over the ages has often been that Scripture has been interpreted in a way that nullifies the purpose of our obedience to Him and to His Word.

Either it is made into a legalistic device that truly does become a means for self-righteousness or else it is actually discounted in a view of “grace” that suggests that it does precisely the opposite of what Paul says that it should do, for example in Romans 6 & 7.

God gives us grace that we may do His will: that is why we need grace, because we cannot do His will apart from His charis.

His grace enables us to “yield our members” to righteousness as the gospel is realized in our lives as the power, the dunamis, of God unto salvation to everyone who believes as His righteousness is revealed in us, to us and through us from faith to faith.

This makes the search to know and to do His will so exciting as we come to know Him more and more completely and help others to do the same.

Then it’s no longer a matter of minimizing the gospel but of seeking all its fullness because we know that the more fully we conform to His Word, the more deeply and experientially we know Him.