Here is a great quote from chapter two of The Bookends of the Christian Life. It goes along very well with what we considered this last Sunday morning from the book of Romans.
For many of us, our initial encounter with the gospel when we first trusted Christ occurred many years ago and is now a distant memory. Furthermore, the book of Romans may now be overly familiar to us; it just doesn’t generate the same excitement it surely generated among the Roman believers when it was first read in their churches. The Christian life may now be more of a duty than a joyous response to the gospel. Consequently we may not experience the motivating power of the gospel.
That’s why we need to intentionally bathe our minds and hearts in the gospel every day. Remember, we need the gospel not only as a door into an initial saving relationship with Christ, but also as the first bookend to keep our daily lives from becoming a performance treadmill. As we rely on Christ’s righteousness in this manner, far from leading to a license to sin, it actually motivates us to deal with the sin we see in our lives by presenting our bodies as living sacrifices to God.
