The prompting of conviction is a highlight of a good book.

When going through Sinclair Ferguson’s, The Whole Christ, in which he discusses the “Marrow Controversy” from eighteen-century Scotland and its related issue of God’s grace in Christ, it would have been so easy to just gloss over the parts I thought I already knew. But by taking a shortcut, there would be a failure to truly know what Ferguson is intending to relate to the attentive reader. I’d fail to grasp the meaning, and it’d be my loss.

Overcoming the obstacle of over-familiarity proved to be a difficult task. Being born into a household of first-generation Christian parents, I was instilled with basic biblical doctrine at home and church before I was old enough to remember. Ideas like the grace of God, the centrality of Christ, and even legalism as a hindrance to those ends become as second nature.

When doctrine become so common, it’s hard to keep those truths as sacred in the heart. There’s a sinful disconnect between the head and the heart, and Ferguson perceptually writes on the matter, “It is all too possible to have an evangelical head and a legalistic heart. It was this that the Marrow Men found themselves confronted, several of them first in themselves.”

In the case of the “legalistic temper” that “pervades the human race” and distorts God’s character and his grace, which is now revealed in Christ, doesn’t a disconnect between the head and heart do the exact same thing? Doesn’t it distort by overshdowing? In the mind, there can be glorious pictures of God’s grace, songs of Amazing Grace, and words of “O wretched man that I am.” But the heart can have a self-fulfilling bias, a haughty look at others faults or impropriety, and an attitude of, “They got what they deserved.” God’s grace may be professed, but it is obcured.

Deception and distortion are difficult to straighten out. Ferguson writes, “It took an angular statement like the Auchterarder Creed and an edgy book like the Marrow to light a taper that smoked out legalistic hearts. It sometimes does.” As discussed in The Whole Christ, these things began the controversy. Ferguson continues, “Together the creed and the Marrow, like litmus paper—of marginal significance in and of itself—revealed at the touch the presence of acid or alkaline, legalism or grace, in the heart and mind.”

And it was at the point of relating my situation to some of the characters in the Scottish religious history event that caused me to take a step back and fully immerse myself in the book, and Ferguson is a gifted communicator of gospel truth. Legalism and its underlying effect of the distortion of God’s character has “one genuine cure.” “It is the same medicine the gospel provides for antinomianism: understanding and tasting union with Jesus Christ himself.”

It is true that The Whole Christ is written for those who are called to pastoral ministry‎.. Thomas Boston was leader of the Marrow Brethren and a pastor himself. A realization of a Christ-centered view of salvation by grace through faith and the “fuller realization of this that created the ‘tincture’ in Boston’s life and ministry. In essence it involved his own heart being bathed in a new sense of God’s graciousness in Christ. The result was that his preaching became an expression of Christ’s preaching.” Our contemporary culture needs more of these types of preachers.

But the book is also a wake-up call for the layman. Has overfamiliarity crept in and distorted God’s grace in Christ? Is there an “experiential legalism” that presses us to ‘do more and try harder?’ Does old-age come upon us and make God’s grace in Christ so commonplace it is uninspiring and leads to no call to action? Union with Jesus Christ is still the same remedy.