By request, here’s the complete paper from July 2010 from which the Completed by the Spirit blog series was adapted. You’re welcome to download it and distribute it freely as long as you do not modify it:
Completed by the Spirit: New Covenant Sanctification in Paul (PDF, 240 kb)
This is the 18th part of a series of posts adapted from a paper I presented at a New Covenant Theology think tank in upstate New York in July 2010.
If sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit in us, why do believers — who have received the Spirit — still need instruction and exhortation?
First, it is important to remember that believers are still imperfect this side of glory. As we have seen, the incarnate Christ as God-Man was the prototype of the believer given the Holy Spirit.
But unlike us, the incarnate Jesus’ communication with the Holy Spirit was perfect.
In Christ, the Spirit’s communication was complete. Continue Reading…
This is the 17th part of a series of posts adapted from a paper I presented at a New Covenant Theology think tank in upstate New York in July 2010.
The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges
Paul’s repeated explanations of the gospel and his doxologies to Christ are not given because the people to whom he writes do not have Christ — or don’t know Him — but because they do know him. Paul writes to the Romans words that echo those we saw last time from 1 Thess 4:9:
[14] I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another. [15] But on some points I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God [16] to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. (Rom 15:14–16)
Paul is bringing the words and truth of Christ to remembrance, because it is the gospel of Christ that brings about all aspects of salvation: justification, sanctification and glorification.
But that’s not new information to these saints. Continue Reading…
Pastor Dustin Segers
I had the great blessing of participating in the 2011 Earth Stove Society Think Tank this week with several presenters, including Pastor Dustin Segers of Greensboro, N.C. He is an active evangelist on the streets of his city and on college campuses.
One of his two presentations was on the topic of Apologetics and New Covenant Theology.
Dustin reminded us to “defend the Biblical God and the Biblical gospel with the Bible. Stand on the Hill of God’s word to defend that selfsame Hill. Jesus and the apostles did it, and you should too.”
You can read a summary of what he presented on his blog, Grace in the Triad.
Video of his presentation will be available soon. I recommend both.
Pastor Moe Bergeron
Pastor Moe Bergeron spoke at the Earth Stove Society’s 2011 Think Tank (in which I participated) on July 27 on the topic “The Neglect of the Spirit of God in NCT.”
Paul contrasted the Old Covenant economy of the letter with the New Covenant economy of the Spirit (2 Cor 3, Gal 3) but most theological systems — including the New Covenant Theology movement — obscure, ignore or diminish the role of the Holy Spirit as the indwelling Spirit of Christ in the believer. Moe believes that it’s time to change that.
I highly recommend you give Moe a listen: http://earthstovesociety.com/?p=314
This is the 14th part of a series of posts adapted from a paper I presented at a New Covenant Theology think tank in upstate New York in July 2010.
In our last installment in this series, we noted that love is a God-given, Spirit-provided quality that impels actions in the believer and that it is that same Spirit-provided love that forms the outworking of the New Covenant ethic.
Love In Hard Places by D. A. Carson
We’ll continue and wrap up our look at love with a rather long quotation from D. A. Carson, in which he summarizes Paul’s view on love as it relates to those two loves – God and neighbor – which have their exposition in the two tables of the Old Covenant:
Similarly, Paul insists that what is fulfilled in one word, viz. Leviticus 19:18, the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is the entire second table of the Decalogue: love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom. 13:8– 10). Despite arguments to the contrary, the double command to love is not some sort of deep principle from which all the other commandments of Scripture can be deduced; nor is it a hermeneutical grid to weed out the laws of the old covenant that no longer have to be obeyed while blessing those that are still operative; nor is it offered as a kind of reductionistic substitute for all the Old Testament laws. In some ways, the twin laws of love, love for God and love for neighbor, integrate all the other laws. They establish the proper motives for all the other imperatives, viz. loving God and loving one’s neighbor.
But the “fulfillment” language suggests something more. All the laws of the old revelation, indeed all the old covenant Scriptures, conspire to anticipate something more, to point to something beyond themselves. They point to the coming of the kingdom, the gospel of the kingdom; they point to a time when life properly lived in God’s universe can be summed up by obedience to the commandment to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and by the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.[1]
This is the 13th part of a series of posts adapted from a paper I presented at a New Covenant Theology think tank in upstate New York in July 2010.
Love is a repeated theme for Paul.
While we have seen previously in this series that love fulfills the law and that God’s love is poured into us by the Holy Spirit, let’s look at how Paul describes that love. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul writes:
[1] If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. [2] And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. [3] If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
First, let’s note that in accordance with love being something poured into us by the Holy Spirit, that love is not something that would be described by Paul as “practical benevolence. In fact, he cautions, “If I give away all I have … but have not love, I gain nothing.” Love is not the result of our actions; rather it is a God-given, Spirit-provided quality that impels actions in the believer.
It is that same Spirit-provided love that forms the outworking of the New Covenant ethic.
This is the 12th part of a series of posts adapted from a paper I presented at a New Covenant Theology think tank in upstate New York in July 2010.
If an external code is the antithesis of a life in the Spirit (as we noted in our last installment), what is the expression of a life in the Spirit? Love. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).
That love, that love from God via the Holy Spirit given to dwell in us is, as Paul tells us, the fulfilling of the law:
[8] Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. [9] For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” [10] Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. (Romans 13:8–10)
John Bunyan
Lest anyone think we’retreading on new ground in the blog series “Completed by the Spirit” that we are anthologizing here, let’s take a moment and visit John Bunyan’s “Of the Law and a Christian.” (This article is available as part of John Bunyan’s Miscellaneous Pieces as a free download from Project Gutenberg or from Amazon in hardcover, paperback or Kindle formats.)
Unlike those who would say, “Moses will drive you to Christ to be justified and Christ will send you back to Moses to be sanctified,“[1] it is the office of God the Holy Spirit and not the purpose of the written code to sanctify us. (The law-for-sanctification view is discussed further in Part 4 of this series.)
In the late 1600’s, Bunyan made the relationship of the Christian to the law as clear and plain as probably anyone ever has in “OF THE LAW AND A CHRISTIAN” (emphasis in boldface mine):
