In Christ Alone, the Remix

I love hymns. They are God centered, glory driven, grace distilling, time tested, biblically rooted gold mines of truth that we sing back to God in response to what He teaches us through the ministry of the preached word. But sometimes, the truth to be found in hymns is a bit tough to find because of the difficult wording... so I like to take some liberties of translation in my head sometimes to get at what the author of the hymn was actually saying. I did this here before with one of my favorite hymns, Before the Throne of God Above, and I'd like to do the same with one of my other favorite hymns, In Christ Alone.

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My one and only hope for salvation is only ever found in Christ,
He is the source of all good and strength in me, and the reason why I worship;
He is my Cornerstone, He is the support of all that I am, He is my solid Ground,
And it is He who stands firm through even the fiercest drought and storm, both physical and spiritual.
How high His love is shown to be, how deep His peace is proven,
When my fears are calmed, and when I no longer have to struggle!
He is my Comforter, He is my Everything,
So it is here, in the love of Christ, that I stand.

Only ever in Christ! He became a human:
The complete fullness of God in the form of a helpless baby!
He gave Himself to us as a gift of love and righteousness,
And was despised by the very ones that He came to save.
And on that cross, as Jesus died,
The just wrath of God toward our sin was answered for, and satisfied,
Because every single sin of God's people was put on Jesus.
I have become alive, and continue to live, in the death of Christ.

His body laid there in the tomb:
The Light of the world, put to death by the darkness of sin.
Then, bursting forth in the fullness of His glory,
He rose again from the grave!
And now, since He stands victorious over sin and death,
The curse of sin and its ability to kill me no longer have any control over me,
Because I belong to Christ, and He belongs to me;
My life and soul have been purchased forever by the precious blood of Christ.

I no longer am bound by guilt in this life, and I no longer fear death:
This is the power of Christ in me.
From the beginning of my life, to my final breath,
Jesus is Lord over my life and my destiny.
And none of Satan's power, nor any plan made by man,
Can ever take me away from His hand.
Until He returns again, or decides to take me home to heaven,
I will stand here in the power of Christ!

His Superior Beauty and Worth

The glory of Christ is seen in his absolute right and power to annihilate or incapacitate Satan and all demons. But the reason he refrains from destroying and disabling them altogether is to manifest more clearly his superior beauty and worth. If Christ obliterated all devils and demons now (which he could do), his sheer power would be seen as glorious, but his superior beauty and worth would not shine as brightly as when humans renounce the promises of Satan and take pleasure in the greater glory of Christ.

-John Piper, "Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ" (p. 82)

God knows what He's doing...

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that."
-James 4:13-15

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand.
-Proverbs 19:21

The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.
-Proverbs 16:9

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
-Jeremiah 29:11

Jesus and Politics

If we were to remove all of the biblical teaching on caring for the marginalized and the significance of social justice, we would be left with a rather slim book. If we took away the role of stewardship of creation and of cultivating natural resources, Adam and Eve would have been left with very little to do in the Garden. It would be too easy to simply identify Jesus with a political party, to simply put him on the left or on the right. The ethic of the new community demands humble participation, maybe even realizing that the solutions to complex social issues and problems transcends party platforms. The ethic of the new community may demand that - like all things for its members - we recognize that we now see dimly, and not so clearly as those who have put Jesus on the left or on the right would like us to think.

-Stephen J. Nichols, "Jesus: Made in America" (pp. 220-221)

Cream of Wheat

Christian music, originally called Jesus Music, once fearlessly sang clearly about the gospel. Now it yodels of a Christ-less, watered down, pabulum-based, positive alternative, aura-fluff, cream of wheat, mush-kind-of-syrupy, God-as-my-girlfriend kind of thing.

-Steve Camp, thesis 41, "A Call for Reformation in the Contemporary Christian Music Industry"

Reducing Jesus

To those fundamentalists and evangelicals who singularly focus on giving invitations, the image of Jesus standing and knocking on the doors of hearts, drawn from Revelation and not from the Gospels, assumes iconic status. To evangelicals of a pacifist stripe, Jesus turning the other cheek reigns supreme. To the socially conscious, Jesus embodied in the poor becomes the rallying point. To just about all American evangelicals Jesus becomes the best friend, the Savior next door. All of these are biblically based images. The problem comes when such a focus on a particular episode in the Gospels or a particular characteristic or trait of Jesus leads one to downplay or even dismiss other episodes of the biblical narrative and other aspects of his character. Jesus comes to us as a complex figure, and reducing him does an injustice to the Gospel accounts. Reducing him does an injustice to Jesus himself.

-Stephen J. Nichols, "Jesus: Made in America" (p. 88)

2 x 2 = 4 ?

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason... The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn... There is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it's practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic... The old humilty made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humilty makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether... We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

-1908, G. K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy" (pp. 31-32)