The Glory of His Grace

For someone who reads theology all year round, it’s nice to have a light, non-note-taking summer read that gets the heart racing and strains the eyeballs in afternoon-long episodes of reading on the porch. And thanks to C.J. Mahaney’s recommendations, I found a book for that exact purpose.  

Riveting, sorrowful, and well-worth the time, James L. Swanson’s book takes an historical, hour-by-hour look at the events following Lincoln’s assassination. There’s so much I didn’t know, like the fact that John Wilkes Booth’s team of conspirators also targeted William Seward and Andrew Johnson. 

This quote, from Boston Corbett, the man who shot Booth, fascinated me (I hope it doesn’t give away too much):

“While Booth’s body lay before me, yet alive, but wounded, and when I saw that the bullet had struck him just back of the ear, about the same spot that his bullet hit Mr. Lincoln, I said within myself, ‘what a fearful God we serve’” (pp. 340-41).

With amazing insight and searing exposition of biblical texts, J.C. Ryle’s volume on Holiness is a breath of fresh, Scriptural air in an age of selfishness that has left the modern church, and the Christian, trapped in its own nightmare of repulsive sin.

As I reflect on the last few days in which I’ve loaded boxes, driven half way around Louisville, and spent a lot of time in the company of others—away from the regular silence and solitude I enjoy—one thing has become glaringly obvious: I am more sinful than I thought.

It’s easy to treat my own wounds lightly, to soft-pedal my own sins and to say, in essence, ‘Oh, you’re not that bad.’ And it doesn’t work. Ryle makes the point perfectly with an illustration about a boy:

“Of all the foolish things that parents say about their children, there is none worse than the common saying, “My son has a good heart at the bottom. He is not what he ought to be; but he has fallen into bad hands. Public schools are bad places. The tutors neglect the boys. Yet he has a good heart at the bottom.” The truth, unhappily, is diametrically the other way. The first cause of all sin lies in the natural corruption of the boy’s own heart, and not in the school” (Holiness, p. 4).  

The problem isn’t with my busy schedule. It’s not with the limited amount of time to spend with God. And it isn’t because I’m tired or because I’m not in my own house. It isn’t even because there’s been more pressure lately. It’s because of my heart. The first cause of all sin lies in this boy’s heart.