Staff Allan T.

Raya August 1, 2019

Book Report: How People Change by Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp

This book talks about how a christian life works using examples of real people on how
they operate in God’s grace. It also discuss how a life in times of challenges and blessings change.
It points out that its not the circumstance that determine the person but circumstance shows
who truly the person is. It conclcuded that it is the Lord who works and the Lord will also be the
steady source of living water of life.

The book discusses about the gospel gap. This is about the delima of a christian life from
the transition and struggles of the old nature and the new nature in Christ. The push and pull of
the flesh and spiritual nature in the “here and now” context is real and growing when a christian
grow in his walk with the Lord. The author added that “it is the here and now that many of us
experience gospel blindness.” Our sight is dimmed by the tyranny of the urgent, by the siren call
of success, by seductive beauty of physical things, by our inability to admit our problems, and by
the casual relationships within the body of Christ that we mistakenly call fellowship.

This blindness can be summarized by these three fundamental forms: identity blindness
by which christians doesnt have gospel perspective, second is the here and now gap of the gospel
causes us to be blinded by God’s provision, and third is the blindness of the process where
christian should understood the continuous sanctification by struggling into the becoming of
christ-likeness.

These things created a spiritual hole in us and these are filled by the humanistic effort
such as formalism, legalism, mysticism, activism, biblicism, psychologyism and socialism. These
replacement are attractive because they each emphasize one important aspect of the gospel.
Here is danger, when we reduce the gospel into one of these elements. These isms appeal to our
selfishness, where we think that we are the center of the universe and to our environmentalism,
where we tend to believe that the sin that sorround us is more dangerous that the sin that resides
inside us.

In conclusion, the author urges us to not forget daily the grace of God. It is when we forget
our desperate condition, when we are more excited in changing the world rather than what we
do about the radical change of heart and life that the gospel promises because of Christ’s
presence in our hearts where we are self-sufficient and pose independence from God. It changes
us, makes us blind.

What shall we do? Our externalist christianity needed to be infused with the present
power of the gospel. It is not enough to embrace Christ’s promises of life after death but to
embrace the life before death. This can only be made possible because of christ’s grace working
in our hearts today. This is what this book is all about. It celebrates the grace of forgiveness that
is our because of the life and death and ressurection of Christ, and it keeps it eye on the hope of
eternity and the present grace. And I thank you.