John MacArthur - Our Sufficiency in Christ

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OUR SUFFICIENCY IN

CHRIST

JOHN MACARTHUR

Our Sufficiency in Christ

Copyright 1991 by John MacArthur

Originally published by Word Publishing

Crossway Books edition first published 1998

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this book are taken from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by The Lockman Foundation and are used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible: New International Version, copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version.

First Crossway printing, 1998

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacArthur, John 1939

Our sufficiency in Christ / John F. MacArthur.

p.cm.

Originally published : Dallas : Word Pub., cl991.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 13: 978-1-58134-013-6

ISBN 10: 1-58134-013-3

1. Spiritual LifeChristianity.2. Christianity20th century
Controversial literature.I. Title.

BV4501.2.M16251998

273.9dc219820910

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To the memory of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a gifted servant of God, who in another place and time built his life and ministry on the sufficiency of Christ. May there be many more like him.

In Him all the fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete.

Colossians 2:910

Thanks to Phil Johnson, Dennis McBride, and Lance Quinn, good friends whose contributions to this effort are known to the Lord.

His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.

2 Peter 1:3

IN HIS BRILLIANT SATIRE THE SCREWTAPE Letters C. S. Lewis imagined this dispatch from the demon Screwtape to his apprentice, Wormwood, who was trying desperately to keep his human patient from practicing biblical Christianity:

My Dear Wormwood,

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call Christianity And. You knowChristianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring....

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere understanding. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of modrn European thought (partly our work) comes in so useful. The Enemy [God, in Screwtapes reckoning] loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going? they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective unchanged we have substituted the emotional adjective stagnant. We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attainnot as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is,

Your affectionate uncle
Screwtape

That describes precisely the strategy Satan is using with maximum effectiveness against the church today. Lewis exposed in those few words the essence of the problem I hope to address in this book. When he wrote that mythical letter from Uncle Screwtape in the 1940s, Lewis was correctly diagnosing an ailment that has practically crippled the contemporary church.

The villainous Screwtape hated mere Christianity and desperately wanted to adorn it with worldly ideas, fads, trendy add-ons, and whatever else he could sell gullible Christians. Why? Because he knew those things can only water down and weaken the purity of the faith. Pure Christianity needs no embellishment: [Christs] divine power has granted to us