A most excellent quote from Ferguson:
“The great gospel imperatives to holiness are ever rooted in indicatives of grace that are able to sustain the weight of those imperatives. The Apostles do not make the mistake that’s often made in Christian ministry. [For the Apostles] the indicatives are more powerful than the imperatives in gospel preaching.
So often in our preaching our indicatives are not strong enough, great enough, holy enough, or gracious enough to sustain the power of the imperatives. And so our teaching on holiness becomes a whip or a rod to beat our people’s backs because we’ve looked at the New Testament and that’s all we ourselves have seen. We’ve seen our own failure and we’ve seen the imperatives to holiness and we’ve lost sight of the great indicatives of the gospel that sustain those imperatives.”
[see Titus 2:11-13; 1 Pt.1:1-2; 2 Thes.2:13; Rom.8:28-29 and 15:16.]
The challenge:
a) root the commands to be holy in the grace of our electing Father, the work of His Son on the Cross and the ongoing work of the indwelling and filling Spirit towards our holiness.
b) not to avoid the commands, but make certain our indicatives are strong enough to support them.
[CAPTURED FROM The Shepherd’s Scrapbook]
