Engaging God's World Chapter 4

I really like the way that Plantinga talks about God's law in the beginning of this chapter.  Even Christians seem to have a very negative view of God's law sometimes.  If is often seen as a burden and not an act of grace.  I love the way that Plantinga refutes this notion when his says this:
"We chafe under commandments.  They nick our pride and cramp our style.  We think they're for children.  In a secularist frame of mind, we human beings think of obedience to God's law as distasteful, even cowardly, knuckling under someone else's will.  But when we have been shorn of such self-deseption, we can see that God's law is in fact one more exhibit of God's grace.  What God carved in stone at Sinai was a recipe for real freedom."
This idea is so counter cultural for Americans.  We are all about individual liberty and cannot stand the idea of submitting to someone else's will.  However, when sin is entered into the story things become different.  Sin is bonding and enslaving.  When we allow it to, it takes us in and refuses to let us out.  Christ has set us free from the bonds of sin, but we willfully pick up our shackles and refasten them to our wrists and feet very often.  Obedience to God's law is freedom from sin, without obedience we will remain a slave to it.

I also really enjoyed reading about "Double Grace."  I have been well informed about the ideas of justification and sanctification but had never heard it put in these terms.  It is truly only by God's grace that he allows us to have either of these things.  I think that sanctification needs to be emphasized because we often see only justification as grace.  If we truly see sanctification as gracious gift of God it will change how we approach our daily lives.  Plantinga says "A Christian life needs a Holy Ghost miracle, but also our own hard work."  I also really liked a quote by Jonathan Edwards that says this:
"Passing affections easily produce words; and words are cheap;... Christian practice is a costly laborious thing.  The self-denial that is required of Christians, and the narrowness of the way that leads to life, don't consist in words, but in practice.  Hypocrites may much more easily be brought to talk like saints, than to act like saints."  It is through our sanctification that people will see Christ in us because we will be bearing fruit.  Unbelievers are tired of Christians who produce cheap words.  They are ready to see Christians who practice a costly and laborious self-denial.