Author: Jojo Agot

Pastor at Victory. Faculty and adviser at Every Nation Leadership Institute (ENLI). MA in Theology and Mission at Every Nation Seminary.

The Order of Salvation

Ordo Salutis (Order of Salvation) from Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology:

1. Election (God’s choice of people to be saved)
2. The gospel call (proclaiming the message of the gospel)
3. Regeneration (being born again)
4. Conversion (faith and repentance)
5. Justification (right legal standing)
6. Adoption (membership in God’s family)
7. Sanctification (right conduct of life)
8. Perseverance (remaining a Christian)
9. Death (going to be with the Lord)
10. Glorification (receiving a resurrection body)

A Transformation of Taste Buds

Dane C. Ortlund:

New birth does not simply change us by giving us a new power to do the same things we always wanted to do. It changes us by getting down underneath even the very level of our desires and changing what we want. Sovereign, regenerating grace does not enable us to do what we don’t want to do. More deeply, it brings us to want to do what we should want to do. Regenerating grace is grace that softens us way down deep at the core of who we are. This is taste-bud transformation. In a miracle that can never be humanly manufactured, we find ourselves, strangely, delighting to love God. We are changed. The will itself is renovated. We see things as they really are.

Edwards on the Christian Life

Dane C. Ortlund:

How does a man who never typed an e-mail or drove a car or swung a golf club or watched a Super Bowl or blogged or tweeted or Skyped help me live my twenty-first-century Christian life? Not much if what matters essentially in Christian living is what we do. A lot if what matters essentially in Christian living is what we are.

Edwards walks us through the wardrobe into Narnia. We are given glasses– not sunglasses, which dim everything, but their opposite: lenses that brighten everything.

Eugene Peterson on Busy Pastors

From Peterson’s book The Contemplative Pastor:

The word busy is a symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection. The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront.

I (and most pastors, I believe) become busy for two reasons; both are ignoble. Continue reading Eugene Peterson on Busy Pastors

Broken But Blessed

Derek Kidner on Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32:

The conflict brought to a head the battling and groping of a lifetime, and Jacob’s desperate embrace vividly expressed his ambivalent attitude to God, of love and enmity, defiance and dependence. It was against him, not Esau or Laban, that he had been pitting his strength, as he now discovered; yet the initiative had been God’s, as it was this night, to chasten his pride and challenge his tenacity. ‘With the cunning thou dost wrestle’ (Ps. 18:26; cf. AVmg). The crippling and the naming show that God’s ends were still the same: He would have all of Jacob’s will to win, to attain and obtain, yet purged of self-sufficiency and redirected to the proper object of man’s love, God himself. Continue reading Broken But Blessed