William Willimon, from his book, Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry, on baptism and grace:

Part of the point of becoming a Christian is that it is something done to us, for us, before it is anything done by us. What we might have done different, had it been our action alone, is not as important as what Christ and his church does for us in baptism. As an infant, I was the passive recipient of this work in my behalf. Someone had to hold me, had to administer the water of baptism, had to tell me the story of Jesus and what he had done, had to speak the promises of what he would do, had to live the faith before me so that I might assume the faith for myself. In other words, by water and the Word, it was all gift, grace.

Matthew Mason, one of the regular contributors to the blog of the The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology, wrote in a post some time ago of the growing trend in evangelical circles to speak of 'repenting of our righteousness'. Mason points out that proponents of this perspective argue 'that the gospel is the beginning and end of of the Christian life, that all our problems come from a lack of orientation to the gospel...[and] that Christians should speak like this of our present attempts to obey God.'

The basic point they wish to make is sound – your understanding of salvation must be rooted in the gospel, along with the recognition that you can do nothing of your own to earn or merit salvation. Agreed. But the argument then extends further to include the idea that you grow as a Christian by increasing your belief in the gospel, or trusting more in the gospel, and so on. Well, to a degree, that is also true. This is emphasized so strongly, however, that any discussion of good works leads to a warning to be careful you're not trusting in your works for salvation.

So what is the place of righteousness, then? And what of the Bible's call to pursue righteousness and holiness? C.S. Lewis, in the second chapter on faith in Mere Christianity, writes,

The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His 'sonship' with us, will make us, like Himself, 'Sons of God'... In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing... And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says... If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already.

Any attempt to earn your righteousness in salvation is to be avoided, certainly. But it is hard to understand how you grow as a disciple of Christ if you are not pursuing righteousness in response to the good news of the gospel. Our homegroups at church have just begun a series on Romans 12-16. It is particularly noteworthy that after discussing the gospel message in the first eleven chapters, Paul then goes on to lay out some pretty in-depth applications of that gospel and how it should shape our lives as Christians. Those last chapters of Romans show us that you must indeed make the gospel the centre of your life as a Christian, but that you do so by actively pursuing righteousness. And it is not just here in Romans; the Bible speaks repeatedly of the call to live righteous lives. Think of the Psalms, or the book of James.

The Heidelberg Catechism says two important things about this. First, in Q&A 86, it asks why we must still do good when we have been delivered from our misery by God's grace. The response:

We do good because Christ by his Spirit is renewing us to be like himself, so that in all our living we may show that we are thankful to God for all he has done for us, and so that he may be praised through us. And we do good so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits, and so that by our godly living our neighbours may be won over to Christ.

It is striking here to note that God is praised through our righteous living. Those who call us to 'repent of our righteousness' would likely find these words hard to stomach. But perhaps it is even more striking, then, that assurance of our faith is linked with the practice of righteousness. And secondly, the Catechism indicates that genuine repentence and conversion has two parts: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new. In describing the coming-to-life of the new, the Catechism tells us that this is marked by 'wholehearted joy in God through Christ and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to' (Q&A 90).

Belief in the gospel motivates you to act in accordance with it. That action is not an attempt to justify yourself, but an expression of your gratitude for God's grace and your acknowledgement of his rule as Lord and King of heaven and earth. You don't repent of your righteousness, because God calls us to righteousness.

Belief in the gospel and the pursuit of righteousness are not contradictory. To be sure, the latter does not precede the former. But the latter must flow out of the former.

Edward Shillito was an English minister who lived from 1872-1948. During the first World War, he wrote this poem, 'Jesus of the Scars'.

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;
Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;
We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow;
We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars we claim Thy grace.

If when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;
We know today what wounds are; have no fear;
Show us Thy Scars; we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong, but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

When talking about the assurance of salvation, we often look to Scripture for the promises of God's faithfulness, such as we find in Romans 10:9, or we point to the work of the Holy Spirit in assuring us of our faith (see Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 21). Yet, especially in Reformed circles, we seldom mention the assurance that comes to us in the Lord's Supper. Consider what Herman Bavinck has to say in the fourth volume of his Reformed Dogmatics on the profound nature of the Supper:

Of primary importance in the Lord's Supper is what God does, not what we do. The Lord's Supper is above all a gift of God, a benefit of Christ, a means of communicating his grace. If the Lord's Supper were only a memorial meal and an act of confession, it would cease to be a sacrament in the true sense. In that case, like prayer, it could only be obliquely and indirectly called a means of grace. The Lord's Supper, however, is on the same level as the Word and baptism and therefore must, like them, be regarded first of all as a message and assurance to us of divine grace.

...[Christ] makes of [the] elements a meal in which the disciples consume his body and blood and thus enter into the most intimate communion with him. This communion does not merely consist in their sitting at one table, but they eat one and the same bread and drink one and the same wine. Indeed, the host here, in granting the signs of bread and wine, offers his own body and blood as nourishment and refreshment for their souls. That is a communion that far surpasses the communion inherent in a memorial meal and an act of confession. It is not merely a reminiscence of or a reflection on Christ's benefits but a most intimate bonding with Christ himself, just as food and drink are united with the body.

...Calvin, accordingly, correctly remarked against Zwingli that the meaning of eating Christ's body and drinking his blood is not exhausted by believing. Believing is a means, a means that is even temporary and destined to become seeing, but the communion with Christ engendered by it goes much deeper and endures forever. It is a mystical union that can only be made somewhat clear to us by the images of the vine and the branch, the head and the body, a bridegroom and his bride, the cornerstone and the building that rests on it. It is this mystical union that is signified and sealed in the Lord's Supper.

Often there seems to be a hesitancy in Reformed circles to say too much about the Lord's Supper for fear of sounding like some of the Lutherans or the Roman Catholics. Yet perhaps the opposite then becomes a problem as well, and they end up saying too little about it. It is not uncommon to hear the charge that the Reformed understand of the Lord's Supper is much more Zwinglian than Calvinist, and while the accusation might not be entirely fair, you can see the warrant for it. When a church holds the Lord's Supper only four or five times a year and goes to great lengths to emphasize the symbolic and memorial nature of it, it severely diminishes the significance of it.

But the invitation to the table is an invitation to enter into intimate communion with Christ. It is an invitation to "taste and see that the Lord is good" (Ps. 34:8). It is an invitation to be united with Christ when physically partaking of the elements. It is an invitation to have a foretaste of the coming marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:6-10). It is an invitation to receive—not just to remember—His grace.

If you do not believe that the Supper actually does something in the first place, there is no impetus to frequently come to the table. But when you truly understand the Supper as a means of grace, how could you not run to the table at Christ's invitation to receive that grace as often as you can?

After finishing up Preaching and Preachers, I felt the desire—if not the urge—to begin to read Iain Murray's two-volume biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Knowing that Lloyd-Jones had been influenced by the Puritans, I was not surprised to discover that already in March of 1926, before he entered the ministry (although at that point already having decided to), he was giving a talk to the Literary and Debating Society at Charing Cross Chapel on Puritanism.

One of the most significant reasons we ought to read the Puritans, he says, is because of the profound depth of faith they demonstrate, and their earnest desire to live a life reflective of the grace of God that had been at work in their lives.

'If you wish to know what Puritanism really is, don't read large volumes on the subject by men who may be scholars but never were Puritans, but rather read the life-stories of Puritans...and pray God to give you light not merely to see what is in print but also to see what is between the lines. The great truth in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is not that Christian endured great hardships on his way to the eternal city, but that Christian thought it to be worth his while to endure those hardships...The only people who have a right to say anything about Christianity are those who have felt its force in their own lives...'

The Puritan, [Lloyd-Jones] argued, is not 'the strong man'. He is: 'a very weak man who has been given strength to realise that he is weak. I would say of all men and women that we are all weak, very weak, the difference being that the sinners do not appreciate the fact that they are weak, whereas the Christians do' (98).

Growing up in Dutch Reformed circles, I did not have a lot of exposure to the Puritans, nor did I during my college years where I was surrounded by—and profoundly influenced by—neocalvinism (which I still primarily identify myself with). However, last year I took a course on the theology of John Owen taught by Sinclair Ferguson, which opened my eyes to the gold mine that is the Puritans.

I remember conversations in college in which we wrestled with the recognition that sometimes neocalvinism could be so focused on thinking about what it meant to bring all of life and creation under the lordship of Jesus Christ that we lost sight of the fact that our souls needed to be submitted to Christ as well. I think reading more of the Puritans may be a way for me to balance that out.