20 Quotes from Michael Reeves on Evangelical Integrity – Matt Smethurst, Michael Reeves

Michael Reeves’s new book Gospel People: A Call for Evangelical Integrity (Crossway, 2022) explores how the gospel should shape those who claim to embrace it. Here are 20 quotes that stood out to me as I read.

The Father’s revelation in the Bible; the Son’s redemption in the gospel; the Spirit’s regeneration of our hearts. These serve as a simple “table of contents” of evangelicalism. (19)

“Evangelicalism” will be a threadbare, washed-up cultural relic for as long as it stands on any other foundation than [the] apostolic gospel. (20–21)

Any man who puts himself above God’s word is putting himself in the place of God. After all, the church has not brought the word of God into being; it is God’s word that has brought the church into being, just as God’s word first brought creation into being. God’s word comes first. (28–29)

To be evangelical is to believe what the church as a whole has always taught. It is to be uneccentric. (33)

Scripture is our bookshelf; tradition is the record of what the church has read or misread there; reason is the set of spectacles we wear as we seek to make sense of what we read. (34)

To err is human, [it is argued]. But that is simply not the case: Adam was not originally sinful, nor was the man Jesus, the one in whom we see sinless humanity as we should be. As God perfectly revealed himself through the humanity of Jesus, so he perfectly speaks through the human authors of Scripture. (37)

Our failures to read Scripture aright say nothing about its actual trustworthiness; they only tell us that to have even the highest view of Scripture is not yet to be biblical. It is not our reading of Scripture that is totally trustworthy: we can hold the highest view of Scripture and use bad interpretation, bad harmonizing, bad apologetics, and bad theology. (41)

There is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus. (47)

Just as the perfect nature of God ensures the perfection of his word, so the perfect nature of Christ ensures the perfection of his work. The gracious acts of God in both revelation and redemption are complete in Christ. (53)

In the early church it is those who confuse justification with sanctification who stand out as the eccentrics. (63)

If [one has] the impression that evangelicals like to collect and pin up doctrines like dead butterflies, we need only look to evangelical hymnody. Through the centuries, evangelicals have not merely admired [the doctrine of justification by faith alone], nor have they merely used it as a fence to mark out the true gospel. We sing it out, often, and often with tears in our eyes, for how it speaks of the majestic goodness of Christ and the sweet security we can have in him. (63)

Just as evangelicals will fight their own individual sin as they keep in step with the Spirit, so we must fight the collective sin of allowing anything but the gospel to be the cause of our unity. (83–84)

Since being gospel people means both unwavering faithfulness to the gospel and a refusal to elevate other issues to the level of the gospel, evangelicals have to walk a line between fighting over too much and discerning too little. (90)

We should not seek to excuse ourselves or gloss over [evangelicalism’s] problems. It runs against the very grain of the gospel we cherish for us to indulge in self-justification. Instead, the evangelical way is not to condone or to flee but to repent and to reform. For evangelicalism, being a gospel movement, is and always has been a renewal movement: we seek to renew ourselves and the church around the gospel (and never vice versa). It is a reformation movement, about adhering ever closer to the gospel in thought, word, and deed. On that reformation hangs the future of evangelicalism. (106)

The more we see of the gospel, the more the three persons of the Trinity (and their work of revelation, redemption, and regeneration) are glorified, and so the more we diminish. Through the gospel, we come to realize that without God’s revelation, we are left groping in the darkness of ignorance. Without the redemption of the Son, we are utterly lost in our guilt and alienation from God. Without the Spirit’s work of regeneration, we are helplessly mired in our sin. (109)

[Faithful evangelicals] will be quick to serve, quick to bless, quick to repent, and quick to laugh at themselves, for their glory is not themselves but Christ. This is the integrity found through the lifting up of Christ in his gospel. . . . Evangelicalism is in need of much healing, but it needs no other cure than the gospel itself. It needs only integrity. (112)

No call to unity, however stirring, will itself achieve unity. Some deeper work in us is needed. Our devilish pride must be dealt with before our devilish discord disappears. . . . Humility is the only soil in which true unity can grow. Only when Christ is more precious to us than our own reputations will we give up our petty rivalries and personal agendas. Only when his glory eclipses all else will we live for his cause and no other. (113)

Evangelicalism is historic, uneccentric, catholic Christianity. (114)

Without a keen awareness of where the church has always stood, the mood of our age—and how we might succumb to it—will be far harder to see. . . . True unity in the gospel must include unity with evangelical thought down through history. (115)

We can be reactive, driven more by fads, culture, or threats against the gospel than by the gospel itself. . . . We can elevate a political agenda or a cultural assumption to the place of primacy only the gospel should have, and that idolatry can be unobserved by all around us simply because they share our tribal assumptions. (116, 117)

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