14 September 2014

How Can a Preacher of Radical Grace Be Radically Self-Centered?

Though the attempt to claim justification without a clear commitment to sanctification outrages our conscience, we usually repress this from conscious awareness, and the resulting anxiety and insecurity create compulsive egocentric drives which aggravate the flesh instead of mortifying it. Thus the Protestant disease of cheap grace can produce some of the most selfish and contentious leaders and lay people on earth, more difficult to bear in a state of grace than they would be in a state of nature. 
--Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Eerdmans, 1979), 103-4