Savoring God’s sovereignty in salvation will bring two things to flower in the believer’s heart. The first flower is humility. Jonathan Edwards said, “You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.” He’s right. Knowing that God saved us according to his good pleasure and not any past, present, or future good works of ours is humbling. Knowing that our love for God is merely in response to his loving initiative is humbling. Knowing that even the faith by which we receive his grace is itself the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8) is humbling. The second flower is blessed assurance. For if we didn’t earn our own salvation, we cannot lose it or return it. 

Did you ever eat something so tasty that you had to close your eyes? If you haven’t, try scallops. Imagine this mouth-watering mollusk: snow-white, pan-seared to perfection with a golden crust, a dash of salt, a pinch of pepper, a brush of butter, a spritz of lemon… delicious! And the texture is as satisfying as the flavor. Since scallop meat is the powerful muscle that opens and closes the shell, it’s thick, and it usually comes with a few grains of sand. Yet when prepared properly, this delicacy somehow seems to melt in your mouth like chocolate on the dashboard. You don’t eat scallops; you savor them.
Whether scallops or something else, we can all think of foods that we savor. How much more then is God’s sovereignty in man’s salvation a theological delicacy worth savoring? We find that glorious truth, gleaming like a diamond on black velvet, in Genesis 25. This passage follows right on the heels of the brief but beautiful wedding of Isaac and Rebekah. But the two lovebirds quickly passed from the honeymoon to the hurt locker, for Rebekah was barren.
Ernest Hemingway once met with a handful of other writers for lunch. It’s said that Hemingway bet each man at the table $10 that he could write an entire story in just 6 words. His friends agreed and anted up as Hemingway scratched out his 6 words on a napkin and passed it around the table. It read: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” You see, Hemingway knew that there’s something universal about the pain of childlessness; the unsatisfied longing in a woman’s heart to kiss her baby; the unmet drive in a man to disciple his children. Isaac and Rebekah felt it too. But more than just pain, in the ancient world they would have suffered the sharp shame of infertility.
So, as the newlyweds set sail into this storm together, the waves cast Isaac upon the Rock of his Salvation. We knew that Isaac loved Rebekah (Genesis 24:67), but now we know how he loved her: he prayed for her. He prayed not just once, but for twenty long years. And the Lord heard his prayers and opened her womb to conceive. Now the expectant lovebirds can get back to their fairy tale, right? Wrong. The pregnancy was hard. Rebekah knew something was wrong, very wrong. So, like Isaac, she ran into the arms of her Heavenly Father; “she went and inquired of the Lord” (Genesis 25:22). And on her knees before the mercy seat, Rebekah learned that her pain was the result of a war being waged in her womb between battling brothers; between two prenatal nations. God said, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23).
Now, was God merely predicting future events? Certainly not. He was proclaiming what he predestined. God determined to divide the two men and the two nations descending from them. It pleased God to choose one and reject the other; to love the younger and hate the older. Paul clarifies this difficult doctrine for us in Romans 9:10- 13: “When Rebekah had conceived children by one man,
“…our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad-in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls- she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’”
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Because the Advent season is upon us, it is particularly fitting to focus on the fact that the Holy Spirit glorified Christ by bringing to completion the miracle of the incarnation. When the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she is going to conceive in her womb and bear the promised Messiah, she wonders how this can possibly come about since she is a virgin (Luke 1:34). The angel tells her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).

This advent season, should Christians focus less on Jesus and more on the Holy Spirit? Do we emphasize Jesus so much that we sometimes neglect the Holy Spirit? After all, we celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christ-mas and the resurrection of Jesus at Easter. We refer to the gospel of our salvation as the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we refer to our Bible and our sermons from the Bible as Christocentric. Even the name of this website is “Christ Over All.”
Too Christocentric? What About the Spirit?
According to one common narrative, Western Christianity has seen a revival of pneumatology in the last century. The Holy Spirit, so the narrative goes, was neglected in Christian worship and theology from the days of the early church until the Pentecostal renewal movements of the early twentieth century. Since that time, however, the Holy Spirit seems to be center stage in much contemporary Christian worship and theological reflection. It is common to see this historical narrative framed by the metaphor of the classic fairytale of Cinderella. Overlooked, neglected, and long uninvited, Cinderella finally showed up to the ball and stole the show. A well-worn explanation for this so-called neglect of the Cinderella Spirit is the church’s overemphasis on the person of Christ.
A survey of this so-called revival of pneumatology will reveal that the new emphasis on the Holy Spirit has often resulted in new theological commitments. These commitments are not fresh articulations of the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3) but departures from it. Pneumatology has been the doorway for declaring that people of non-Christian faith traditions can be saved apart from faith in Jesus Christ.[1] Others have posited pneumatology as the way to know the feminine side of God, a kind of balance to the masculine names of the Father and the Son.[2] Still others have seen the ongoing work of the Spirit to be a kind of liberating of the people of God from the strictures of the cultural ethos that dominated the human authors of Scripture.

Thus, for some, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, emphasis on holy, bears unholy fruit (see Gal. 5:22–23). Rather, such pneumatology becomes the theological justification for a sexual ethic that celebrates gay, lesbian, transgender, and polyamorous sexual expression.[3] If a tree is known by its fruit, the tree on which much contemporary pneumatology grows has a bad root—Satan masquerading as an angel of light rather than the Holy Spirit manifesting his presence and power (2 Cor. 11:14).

So, I ask again, do we run the risk of neglecting the Holy Spirit because of our worshipful obsession with the person of Christ? To borrow the Apostle Paul’s favorite negation, “May it never be!” The problem in our lives, our churches, and our society is not that we focus on the Lord Jesus too much but that we focus on him too little. In fact, if our doctrine of the Holy Spirit is regulated by holy Scripture (which the Holy Spirit inspired) rather than by the imaginations of men, we will see that the individuals, churches, and traditions most in step with the Holy Spirit are those who emphasize Christ most! The reason for this is straightforward. Jesus said, “When the Spirit of truth comes… he will glorify me” (John 16:13).
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Every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we think about the past, and we remember that there is a future for the people of God; that we are having a foretaste at the Lord’s Table of that ultimate fellowship we will have with Him in heaven.

The Lord’s Supper is a rich sacrament full of meaning and blessing for God’s people. Scripture talks about it in various ways, centered on Christ and his life-giving death. Regarding the Lord’s Supper, R. C. Sproul explained its past, present, and future aspects. Remember this next time you celebrate the holy Supper.
Obviously the Lord’s Supper is concerned about remembering something that took place once for all in time past. Often the words “Do This in Remembrance of Me” are carved into the wood of Communion tables. Jesus exhorted His disciples on many matters to be diligent in their learning and to remember the things that He had taught them. But it is as if the culmination of His teaching came in the upper room when He said, “Do this in remembrance of Me” (Luke 22:19b). Our Lord said, in essence, “What is about to take place is the acme of My mission. I am about to ratify a new covenant, and I am going to do it in My blood. I am going to offer the atonement by which redemption is secured for My people. Whatever else you do, do not ever forget this.” …
…So, a major dimension of what takes place in the Lord’s Supper is reflection on the cross, but we miss much of the meaning of the Lord’s Supper if we restrict it merely to the remembrance of things past. There is also a future orientation to the Lord’s Supper. This dimension gets less attention from the church than the others, and I am not sure I understand why.
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