[Justification by faith alone] has been a liberating doctrine; to it is due most of the freedom that we possess today, and if it is abandoned freedom will soon depart. If we are interested in what God thinks of us, we shall not be deterred by what men think; the very desire for justification before God makes us independent of the judgments of men. And if the very desire for justification is liberating, how much more the attainment of it! The man who has been justified by God, the man who has accepted as a free gift this condition of rightness with God, is not a man who hopes that possibly, with due effort, if he does not fail, he may win through to become a child of God. But he is a man who has already become a child of God. If our being children of God depended in slightest measure upon ourselves, we could never be sure that we had attained the high estate. But it does not depend upon ourselves; it depends only upon God. It is not a reward that we have earned but a gift that we received.
J. Gresham Machen | God Transcendent and Other Selected Sermons, ed. Ned Bernard Stonehouse (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1949), 86.
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Tony Phelps
Tony grew up in Rhode Island. He was educated at BA (University of Rhode Island) and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He worked in the insurance industry for ten years. He planted a PCA church in Wakefield, RI where he served for eleven years. In 2015–18 he pastored Covenant Reformed Church (URCNA) in Colorado Springs. He is currently pastor of Living Hope (OPC). Tony is married to Donna and together they have three children.
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“Just trying to stay close to Jesus” was the mantra from a pastor of mine a long time ago. Being new to christianity stopped me from commenting, this quote from Machen should have been my response, if i had known then what i know now. Maybe I should have asked: “since you’re trying to “stay close to Jesus”, does that also mean, by example, that Jesus was “just trying to stay close to the Father?”.