God is the Gospel - Chapter 3

• Preachers can say dozens of true and wonderful things
  about the gospel and not lead people to where the gospel is leading.
• God is the gospel. That is, he is what makes
  the good news good. Nothing less can make the gospel good news.
  God is the final and highest gift that makes the good news good.
  Until people use the gospel to get to God, they use it wrongly.
• We are not capable of changing God. We cannot pay our own debt.
  “Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his
  life” (Ps. 49:7). Therefore, in his great mercy, God intervened to put
  Christ forward as the propitiation of God’s own wrath (Rom. 3:25).
• Thus justification has these two sides: the removal of sin because
  Christ bears our curse, and the imputation of righteousness because
  we are in Christ and his righteousness is counted as ours.
• Every person should be required to answer the question, “Why is it good news to you that your sinsare forgiven?” “Why is it good news to you that you stand righteous
  in the courtroom of the Judge of the universe?”
• if God is not treasured as the ultimate gift of the gospel, none of his gifts will be gospel, good news. And if God is treasured as the supremely valuable gift of the
  gospel, then all the other lesser gifts will be enjoyed as well.
• Forgiveness is simply a way of getting obstacles out of the way so that we can look at each other again with joy
• Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing
  and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if
  Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to
  get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It’s a way of
  overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don’t want
  God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.
• morally we are not good enough in our fallen condition and would be consumed
  in the fire of his holiness if we saw him fully for who he is.
• Created beings simply cannot look on the Creator and see him for
  who he is.
• What I am trying to express here is that the glory of Christ, as
  he appeared among us, consisted not in one attribute or another, and
  not in one act or another, but in what Jonathan Edwards called “an
  admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.”
• The glory of Christ is not synonymous with raw power. The
  glory is the divine beauty of his manifold perfections. To see this
  requires a change of heart.
• The ability to see spiritual beauty is not unwavering. There are ups
  and downs in our fellowship with Christ. There are times of
  beclouded vision, especially if sin gets the upper hand in our lives for
  a season.
• You can’t see and savor God as supremely satisfying
  while you are full of rebellion against him and he is full of wrath
  against you. The removal of this wrath and this rebellion is what the
  gospel is for. The ultimate aim of the gospel is the display of God’s
  glory and the removal of every obstacle to our seeing it and savoring
  it as our highest treasure. “Behold your God!”