A few more quotes from my reading through Thomas Schreiner’s book, The Race Set Before Us.
…we have affirmed that although eternal life is God’s prize of salvation that we pursue with eager hope, eternal life is also the gift of grace that already invigorates us with resurrection life so that we run the race with perseverance. Eternal life is the reward that we trust God will give to us who faithfully endure to the end of the race. Yet eternal life is also the very breath of heaven that already fills our hearts by God’s Spirit and enlivens our “feeble arms and weak knees” (Heb 12:12) to “run the race set before us” (Heb 12:1). 88
We must exercise faith in Jesus Christ in order to receive the prize of eternal life….We make this crucial distinction between the objective basis and the subjective means of salvation to make it clear from the outset that what believers do in order to attain the prize of eternal life does not add to or nullify God’s grace in the saving work of Jesus Christ. The reward we receive by faith in Christ is based on grace alone; it is not grounded on our achievement. Only those who exercise faith in the one true God will receive this reward. 89
If we conceive of Christian faith as only a passive resting on God, we have an inadequate concept….God does not commend a person for a singular act of faith that fails to endure. God does not reward faith that does not go the distance. 95
Faithfulness is the proof of faith….All behavior is conceived in the womb of our beliefs. Therefore, all our desires, all our words and all our deeds make known what we truly believe and what we really value in our hearts. 96
Failure to hear the voice of God in Jesus’ words [John 8:46-47] is not the reason why people do not belong to God; rather, the reason people do not hear God’s word is that they do not belong to God. This is so because hearing is a sensory gift formed in us by God’s creative word just as much as our auditory sense is an endowment from the Creator. 129
Faith…is not only the hand that we stretch out to receive God’s gift of eternal life; the outstretched hand itself is a gift from God. Spiritually our senses toward God were as dead as Lazarus’s ears were to to the wailing of the mourners at his tomb. yet, just as Jesus spoke life into Lazarus in order that he might obey the command, “Lazarus, come out!” so God has “made us alive together with Christ” (Eph 2:5). We are his new creation to whom he has given the gifts of faith and of salvation, in order that we might do the good deeds he has ordained for us to do (Eph 2:8-10). 139
