Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

Here are a few that stood out to me this week:

I saw this on Lisa‘s Twitter sidebar:

“When you labor to show yourself righteous so that God will accept you, you are not submitting to God’s righteousness.” -John Piper

Paul says he wants to “be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith” (Philippians 3:9). There are whole systems built on laboring to be righteous to “gain” God’s acceptance, but even those of us who should know better tend to fall back into that mindset sometimes. I am so glad God’s righteousness is by faith.

Seen at Challies:

There can be no victory where there is no combat. —Richard Sibbes

I tend to want victory without having to expend the effort of combat, and it just doesn’t work that way.

And I hadn’t realized it t first, but these quotes might seem to be opposites. How can we expend victory by effort (or combat) if spiritual victory is by faith? Well, the first quote deals with the righteousness we need to stand before a holy God and not be condemned but rather approved, and Christ’s righteousness is the only kind that will suffice. That we receive by faith. We can’t earn it or work it up on our own. With that righteousness we can stand before a holy God without fear. But working that out into our everyday lives is what we call sanctification. Even that is accomplished by faith, and yet there are times God asks us to act on something in faith. In some of Israel’s battles in the Old Testament, God fought for them in unusual ways; in others, they had to actually take up sword and spear and shield and go to battle, yet they had no victory unless God enabled them. So even though my standing before God and his acceptance of me is by faith, in everyday battles, like, say, eating right and getting exercise, I still lean on Him for grace and strength, but I still have to expend effort: my body isn’t going to exercise itself, God isn’t going to exercise it for me, and I am not going to have any victory in weight loss without expending some effort at it. Someone once said “God will help you with your math homework, but He is not going to do it for you.”

I know many of you already know these principles, but I just felt I needed to explain further for anyone who might be confused by those two statements.

In another vein, this struck me from Warren Wiersbe’s With the Word, p. 293, commenting on Job 21, particularly Job’s “friends” trying to tell him that his suffering must be because of sin because God prospers the righteous:

If comfort and wealth are evidences of holiness, our Lord was not holy, for He had little earthly comfort and wealth, and He died a terrible death on the cross. Perhaps you need to examine your own “logic” and see if you are thinking like God or like the devil (Ps. 1:1; Matt. 16:21-28).

I don’t know how the “prosperity gospel” people miss things like that.

If you’ve read anything that particularly spoke to you that you’d like to share, please either list it in the comments below or write a post on your blog and then put the link to that post (not your general blog link) in Mr. Linky below. I do ask that only family-friendly quotes be included. I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder.

Don’t forget to leave a comment, even if you don’t have any quotes to share! 🙂