I look forward to Tuesdays. On this day each week, I get to spend anywhere from two to three hours in the car as I drive across the river and through the city to work, rather than getting to work from home. I despise traffic, and drive a vehicle with a manual transmission. But on this one day, I get to listen to one or two messages from Pastor Patrick Abendroth of Omaha Bible Church.

Pastor Abendroth has confidence in his preaching, but is nothing if not humble. He is consistently careful to properly apply passages in context, both culturally and textually. He is one of the most effective expositional preachers I have ever heard.

Today I listened to “What makes the Gospel Glorious” and was filled to overflowing yet again. Here are some quotes that stood out to me:

  • We don’t see grace as glorious because we don’t see ourselves as sinners; utterly and completely devoid of any merit whatsoever, to please God in any way, shape, or form.
  • …the key to rightly praising Jesus Christ and exalting the cross and exalting what he has done for us and praising him; the key to that is understanding what you’ve been saved from. It’s no wonder we’re mumbling about the gospel. It’s no wonder we’re half-in, half-out in some sort of lackadaisical way, calling what we give to him praise, even though it’s pretty shameful, because we think somehow we’re good enough to earn grace, which is contradiction of terms.
  • [an aside on Ephesians 2:1-3] Throughout history, every corruption of the gospel, every perversion of the gospel, has started here. It started by not seeing this. Somehow it’s something other than spiritually dead, and that leads us to somehow it’s something other than just the cross; perhaps it’s the cross and something else.

    But this is the key to understanding salvation; it’s understanding sin… Dead means more than sick. Dead means dead (spiritually dead here..). Dead means more than dying. Dead means more than in danger of dying. By the way, this therefore means that the salvation of the gospel analogy that says: “God throws you the life-preserver, and all you need to do is reach out and grab the life preserver” that’s been so famous shows absolute and complete biblical ignorance. Dead people don’t grab life-preservers. You’re at the bottom of the ocean. You’re fish food, and they’re eating your innards, and you’re swollen, right? That’s the right idea. And God has to go down there and give you a new heart, and make you alive, because you’re dead. So let’s be clear… it’s not that you’re sick. Sinners are dead spiritually… Dead means the total humbling of the sinner before God.