Doctrine Hijacked by Pride

Zack Eswine, who for me has been a beautiful, grace-seasoned, calm embodiment of where Calvinism--a big God with big grace for big sinners--takes us:

“Why I’m what some people call, ‘a Calvinist.’” That was the title. It totaled about sixty or so pages. It was bound with red or blue plastic for a spine and then fronted with a clear cover so that the title was front and center for the reader.

I was the author. I was twenty-two and zealous. I was devouring a little book by A.W. Pink entitled The Sovereignty of God. I wanted those whose adult table I wanted to join to know the truth as I saw it at the time. So I sent this treatise to my family and friends. What better way to show Jesus’s love to loved ones than by writing and sending a document they did not expect, to answer questions they were not asking, with a tone that was not warranted, in order to defend an argument that they were not engaged in or had heard of, and all of this by surprise without so much as a conversation?

G. K. Chesterton (whom I would not have read at the time because he was not my “sort” of Jesus follower) once said that there was a kind of thought that stops thought. I’ve come to believe that what Chesterton said about this brand of skepticism in his generation at least partially describes what Jesus meant when he spoke to those who handled the Bible in his. By this time I knew that Jesus does not coddle church leaders who misuse his teachings to promote error. What I would later learn is that Jesus likewise does not coddle church leaders who use knowledge, even of good proper things, as a tool for arrogance and spite. 

--Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being (Crossway, 2013), 126