One of the great debates that has arisen with the rise of the emergent church and the rise of the influence of N. T. Wright has been over the relationship between the corporate and cosmic aspects of the gospel and redemption to the individual aspects. My good buddy Glenn Lucke has done some good work on this in a recent post dealing with the gospel and the kingdom:
The Gospel is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God
Well, lo and behold, I'm doing some devotional reading in My Utmost for His Highest this morning and Oswald Chambers speaks to the priority of the cosmic over the personal in the plan of redemption. This is significant because this is from an older, more devotional work, written before all of this controversy started.
Paul states here that the call of God is to preach the gospel. But remember what Paul means by "the gospel," namely, the reality of redemption in our Lord Jesus Christ. We are inclined to make sanctification the goal of our preaching. Paul refers to personal experiences only by way of illustration, never as the end of the matter. We are not commissioned to preach salvation or sanctification— we are commissioned to lift up Jesus Christ (see John 12:32 ). It is an injustice to say that Jesus Christ labored in redemption to make me a saint. Jesus Christ labored in redemption to redeem the whole world and to place it perfectly whole and restored before the throne of God. The fact that we can experience redemption illustrates the power of its reality, but that experience is a byproduct and not the goal of redemption. If God were human, how sick and tired He would be of the constant requests we make for our salvation and for our sanctification. We burden His energies from morning till night asking for things for ourselves or for something from which we want to be delivered! When we finally touch the underlying foundation of the reality of the gospel of God, we will never bother Him anymore with little personal complaints.
(Emphasis mine)
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