GroshLink

Recently reflected on Evangelical Essentials by returning to John Stott's Evangelical Truth (Winner of 2000 Christianity Today Award of Merit). If you haven't read this brief piece, less than 130 pages of text, I would encourage you to do such as it reminds us of

the three essentials to which evangelical people are determined to bear witness. They concern the gracious initiative of God the Father in revealing himself to us, in redeeming us through Christ crucified, and in transforming us through the indwelling Spirit. For the evangelical faith is the trinitarian faith. This is why evangelical Christians place such emphasis on the Word, the cross and the Spirit.

The postscript summarizes evangelical/trinitarian Christianity w/the 3 "Rs" -- revelation through the Father, redemption through the Son, and regeneration through the Holy Spirit, giving birth to humility:

We desire above all else to bear witness to the supreme authority of the Word of God, the atoning efficacy of the cross of Christ and the indepensible ministries of the Holy Spirit. Yet the more the three persons of the Trinity are glorified, the more completely human pride is excluded.  To magnify the self-revelation of God is to confess our complete ignorance without it.  To magnify the cross of Christ is to confess our utter lostness without it.  To magnify the regenerating, indwelling and sanctifying role of the Holy Spirit is to confess our abiding self-centeredness without it.  The Word, the cross and the Spirit, as we have seen, have a special place of honor in our thinking.  We kneel before God the Father with the Bible open before us emphatically not because we are bibiloaters but because we desire humbly to hear God's word.  We knell in imagination at the feet of the crucified and resurrected Lord (as when we come to the Communion table) because we desire humbly to receive that full and free forgiveness which only he can give.  We knell also before the Holy Spirit because we desire humbly to ask him to fill our emptiness and to cause his fruit to ripen in our lives.  Without the Bible we would grope and stagger in thick darkness.  Without the cross we would flounder in the deep waters of guilt and alienation, with no mercy, no redemption, forgiveness and no hope.  Without the indwelling Spirit we would be the helpless victims of indwelling sin, of pathetic self-effort and so of unremitting failure.  It is in this way that we understand why Jesus gave us the model of child's humility (Mt 18:1-4) . . . There is no place for human boasting. "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord" (I Cor 1:31).  Our place is on our faces, prostate before God, and our only appropriate anthem is the Gloria:  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen (pp.122-3, 126).

May we by the grace of God, dwell upon and live out these words not only in the extra-ordinary time of assembled worship but also the ordinary time of living worship in the Presence of God.