In today’s quote from The Great Work of the Gospel: How We Experience God’s Grace, John Ensor shows us that Christ’s substitutionary atonement for us is not a statement of our worth and value to God, but is a statement of the greatness of God’s mercy:
Someone may object, “God loves me. Christ died for me. Therefore I must be really valuable to God since he paid so high a price for me.” Indeed, it is more common than not to hear the cross of Christ proclaimed in this self-esteem-inflating way. But Romans 5:8 says something very different: “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” It is true that God’s love compelled him to send his Son into the world to die for our sins (see also John 3:16). It is not true that his love for us, expressed in the cross, is motivated chiefly by our inherent value and goodness. Christ’s death for us is chiefly motivated by the value he places on himself and his own glory as a loving God. His chief motivation is to display his loving-kindness or mercy, as the glorious thing it is before all creation, that we might taste and enjoy his value, not our own. To accomplish this, he displays a love so awesome and far-reaching that it can love the unlovely.
The Great Work of the Gospel, p. 38-39
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