Chestertonian Gospel
Prayer: Father, please open our eyes to Your glory this morning. We know that compared to your glory, our eyes can barely see. So please give us Your Spirit so that we would see Your glory in this Word and then illumine everything around us by this Word. Please do this for the glory of Christ, and because we ask in His name, Amen.
Introduction
Today we’re beginning a series on Practical Christianity. We will be covering topics like what does the Bible say about Heaven & Hell, Divorce & Remarriage, Baptism, as well as Prayer and Family Worship. A lot of these topics will be practical in the sense that they will tackle Christian practice, but they will also be practical in the sense that they will be applicable to every Christian, topics every Christian should have a working knowledge of. This first message is on the potence of a what we might call a Chestertonian Gospel. And this really is the cornerstone of all practical Christianity. This is how the gospel begins to impact everything.
G.K. Chesterton was a Roman Catholic who famously saw the beauty and extravagance and personalism of God’s world. Life is an epic adventure, an extravagant stage, an outrageously stunning canvas of God’s glory. As Chesterton once put it, “One elephant having a trunk was odd, but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.”
Chesterton pointed out the glory in what many only consider ordinary, and in particular the glory of repetition: “The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”
Unfortunately, Chesterton believed that Calvinism was a plot to bury all that glory in a pile of fatalism (He knows better now). But the Bible teaches that the doctrines of grace (Calvinism) recovered in the Reformation go hand in hand with this exuberance. Sovereign grace brings the glory into sharp relief.
Robert Capon put it this way, “The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two hundred proof grace – bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started. Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale, neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”
Summary of the Text
Scripture tells the story of our salvation like a grand adventure. We are all like lost orphan children, trapped and imprisoned in the great dungeon of sin and death (Gal. 4:3). And just when all hope seemed lost, God sent His Son, born of Eve just like us yet without sin, made under the law just like us, yet no law breaker, to lead the great prison break, and bring us home to His Father – not only to bring us home but to be adopted as sons (Gal. 4:4-5). Not only have we been adopted, but God has given us the very same Spirit that fills His Son, teaching us to call Him “Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6). This means that we are no mere servants but true and full sons, and royal sons, with a full inheritance at that (Gal. 4:7). Do you live like this is true? Do you make breakfast as a redeemed-slave-made-nobility? Do you clean your room and computer program like the son of the High King?
Rags to Riches
Imagine that one of your ancestors was adopted by a Great King, but through pride and greed was tricked by an enemy and betrayed the King and was disinherited, banished from the Kingdom, and all his descendants were sentenced to work as slaves ever since. But one day a letter arrives at your slave hut, and it is an official legal document, a will and testimony with a deed to a castle. But it isn’t just any castle, it’s the castle of the King your ancestor betrayed, and the will restores all that was lost, making you a lord in the kingdom, and it is signed and sealed in the blood of the Great King’s Son with the words “Debt Paid In Full.”
That is what the gospel is. The gospel is the “good news” that what we thought we had lost forever, what we thought was impossible, has been found and completely restored – the gift of living forever as God’s favored nobility. Do you look at the world around you as the entry way of eternal life? We almost lost everything – apart from Christ, all is lost – but in Christ everything is restored, everything is grace and gift. Every day is Christmas. And obedience is the gift of serving the King. Disobedience is ingratitude; obedience is life.
Double Imputation
Theologians call the legal transaction that saved us “double imputation.” The gospel is that what is rightfully ours (sin, guilt, and judgment) inherited from Adam has been reckoned to Jesus Christ on His cross, and what was rightfully His (righteousness, holiness, and the inheritance of God), since He was completely sinless and obedient – that has been reckoned to us by faith alone. “For He [God] hath made Him [Christ] to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him [Christ]” (2 Cor. 5:21). “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4). This double imputation is only possible because Christ came as a new Adam, a new covenantal head. So just as by Adam’s sin, we all inherited sin and death, so by Christ’s righteousness, all who trust in Him inherit His righteousness and life (Rom. 5).
But do you hear this and does it pierce your heart? Does it make you sing? You were on death row, and the King You betrayed traded places with you. Every bite of food, every breath you take – it’s all grace, it’s all mercy, all undeserved gift, which makes every detail shine: it’s all treasure: your house, your car, your body, your food, your yard, every blade of grass, every rock or pebble – it could have not been. You could have not been, and you could be under the curse of sin and death. It might have all been lost. But in Christ you are free and alive, and that makes everything a gift, everything glorious, everything treasure.
Before the Foundation of the World
But there is one more significant piece that really makes a big difference. The Bible teaches that all of this was planned before the foundation of the world: “according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world… having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ… That in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ… in Whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will: that we should be to the praise of His glory” (Eph. 1:4-6, 10-12).
“Sovereign grace” is God’s eternal plot to save. This underlines the glory. Every detail was planned by God. Every detail is His artistry. Your childhood, your family, the people, all the side characters, all the plot development. It was all written for your salvation, that we should be to the praise of His glory.
Conclusions
Chesterton thought that this doctrine of predestination (Calvinism) was a terrible thing because he thought it turned God into a monstrous puppeteer and destroyed the beauty and excitement of Christian life. But Scripture says just the opposite. God’s absolute sovereign grace underlines two things about our salvation: It was utterly impossible for us, and it is all His mercy (Eph. 2:5-9). We were dead, and God made us alive. That is the beginning of the most epic adventure prepared for us.
If God were not absolute goodness and beauty and life, we might grant that His absolute sovereignty could be a downer. But if the most brilliant, creative, and perfectly gracious and personal Author is telling the story, how could the story be anything less than wonderful? We are His characters. This world is His canvas, His symphony. This story is His surprise party. Open your eyes. Nothing is ordinary. We live in a magical world of sunsets and glaciers; grapes that turn into wine; mountains that explode and rise out of the sea; and oceans that foam and churn; wind and rain and snow; and the menagerie of colorful creatures flying, leaping, spinning, croaking. And we have been forgiven and crowned as kings and queens, inheriting it all.
All our doubts come down to one central fear: but what if God isn’t good? And the answer to that is: He sent His Son for you. He sent His Son to make us His sons. Open your eyes. Look at the grace all around you. Look at the glory. Open your mouth: taste and see that He is good.
Prayer: Father, please do not let us to become religious curators of a theological museum. Do not allow Your gospel to become mundane or ordinary. Please keep the wonder and the glory of Your grace fresh in our hearts all our days, so that our neighbors might know Your glory, so that our children and grandchildren will be even more amazed than we are, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, who taught us to pray…
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