This past week I read Recovering Redemption by Matt Chandler. It's a great book on justification and sanctification, on running hard after Christ and putting sin to death, both on individual and corporate levels. Conviction, encouragement, rebuke, and exhortation: all of the good things you want in a solid, gospel-centered book. When it comes to justification and sanctification, there are two errors we can make. The first sees the two of them as the same thing (legalism), and the second sees them as totally distinct (antinomianism). Legalists will tell you that justification cannot happen without sanctification, and antinomians will tell you sanctification is an add-on that has no real bearing on our Christian lives. Both of these are heresies, and Chandler makes it clear, again and again, that justification and sanctification, while distinct, are connected. You can't have justification without sanctification. It just doesn't work that way.
Christian culture in the western world tends to error on the side of antinomianism, and Chandler strikes at its heart. In the second-to-last chapter, Chandler writes about how his church follows Matthew 18.15-17 to a "T", which involves "casting out" those who refuse to repent of sins against the church. Chandler writes:
"[But isn't] that no way to grow a church? Oh, yes, it is. Because, first of all, our mission is not to grow as big as we can. And second of all, perhaps the greatest, most eternal disservice we can do to another person, and thereby to the integrity of the church, is to watch them steadily rejecting the lordship of Christ while play-acting like they're Christians. Because, no, they're not. They're not acting like believers. And Jesus seems to instruct us to treat those who choose their sin over their Savior as those who are not saved. [Whoa.] May need to pull your socks back up after that one, but we don't know any other biblical conclusion to draw. Being baptized somewhere as a kid, but then showing no transformation of life, no willingness to walk in obedience to God, no acceptance of a greater authority than the autonomous tyrant of their own will, and yet still expecting to be hailed as a Christian--we would never apply that kind of logic to any other realm of life and consider it normal." (p. 187)
I'll be posting quotes from the book over the next couple weeks.
Next up on the list is a series of books by Paul Washer:
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