Living the Cross Centered Life Quotes - Day Eighteen

Outward Instead of Inward
Another way to highlight this difference between talking to ourselves and listening to ourselves is to think of an outward, objective focus versus an inward, subjective focus.
As Scottish theologian Sinclair Ferguson notes, “The evangelical orientation is inward and subjective. We are far better at looking inward than we are at looking outward. Instead, we need to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ.”
We can learn to focus outward (and upward!), regardless of how we feel, because the gospel and its events remain completely unaffected by whatever is agitating our emotions. The gospel is objective fact.
That which is subjective changes regularly, like shifting sand. But that which is objective is built on solid rock. When we look inward, we live by the subjective, the temporal, the everchanging, the unreliable, the likely-to-be-false. When we look outward, to the gospel, we live by the objective, the never-changing, that which is perfectly reliable and always completely true.
Your life in Christ is built on solid, objective truth. And of all the innumerable glorious truths of Scripture, the most critical is that Jesus died for our sins.