Quote of the Day

I am consistently struck during my travels how a bond is immediately created with other believers, regardless of the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences between us.    In many respects, this bond is stronger than the biological bonds that exist between father and son, or mother and daughter.  In face, Jesus plainly says that his advent will break such biological bonds, and if we are not willing to forsake these natural relationships when necessary, we have no business seeking a supernatural relationship with Christ.    

- Victor Kuligin

Quote from his book:

The Language of Salvation:  Discovering the Riches of What it Means to Be Saved

Quote of the Day

As long as we treat sin as a minor category, we will always question the atoning death of the God-man to solve our problem.  Show me a person who questions the incarnation and you have shown me a person who takes the categories of sin and God's holiness rather lightly…..The second step is to belittle God.  The biblical picture of God banishing Adam and Eve from Eden for eating a piece of forbidden fruit is replaced with a God who will basically put up with anything.  He is a God more interested in sincerity than holiness, content to tolerate anything we do because he has a love affair with human free will.

….Once we have neutered God of the attribute of his holy wrath and toned down talk of sin by minimizing its dastardly effects - fashioning ourselves as good people who occasionally err - we have effectively removed the requirement for atonement.  It is then a short step to questioning the incarnation.  Why insist on God becoming human and solving a problem we are quite capable of solving ourselves?  The modern propensity to  downplay the divinity of Jesus is tied to a watered-down version of what constitutes sin, and a wishy-washy portrayal of a God too tolerant and friendly to worry about it.  

Victor Kuligin

Quote from his book:

The Language of Salvation:  Discovering the Riches of What it Means to Be Saved

Quote of the Day

 You should find great strength and encouragement in the knowledge that your commission is divine.  God Himself underwrites your battle and has appointed His own Son "the captain of [your] salvation" (Hebrews 2:10).  He will lead you on to the field with courage, and bring you off with honor.......For bravery none compares with our Lord.  He never turned  His head from danger, not even when hell's hatred and heaven's justice appeared against Him.  Knowing all that was about to happen, Jesus went forth and said, "Whom seek ye?" (John 18:4).  Satan could not overcome Him - our Savior never lost a battle, not even when he lost His life.  He won the victory, carrying His spoils to heaven in the triumphant chariot of His ascension.  There He makes an open show of them, to the unspeakable joy of saints and angels.    As part of Christ's army, you march in the ranks of gallant spirits.  Every one of your fellow soldiers is a child of a King.  Some, like you, are in the midst of battle, besieged on every side by affliction and temptation.  Others, after many assaults, repulses and rallyings of their faith, are already standing upon the wall as conquerors.  From there they look down and urge you, their comrades on earth, to march up the hill after them.  This is their cry: "Fight to the death , and the City is your own, as now it is ours! For the waging of a few days' conflict, you will be rewarded with Heaven's glory.  One moment of this celestial joy will dry up all your tears, heal all your wounds, and erase the sharpness of the fight with all the joy of your permanent victory."

- William Gurnall
from Daily Readings from The Christian In Complete Armour (William Gurnall)

Quote of the Day

Remember this; or you may fall into error by fixing your minds so much upon the faith which is the channel of salvation as to forget the grace which is the fountain and source even of faith itself. Faith is the work of God's grace in us. No man can say that Jesus is the Christ but by the Holy Ghost. "No man cometh unto me," saith Jesus, "except the Father which hath sent me draw him." So that faith, which is coming to Christ, is the result of divine drawing. Grace is the first and last moving cause of salvation; and faith, essential as it is, is only an important part of the machinery which grace employs. We are saved "through faith," but salvation is "by grace." Sound forth those words as with the archangel's trumpet: "By grace are ye saved." What glad tidings for the undeserving!…...Still, I again remind you that faith is only the channel or aqueduct, and not the fountainhead, and we must not look so much to it as to exalt it above the divine source of all blessing which lies in the grace of God. Never make a Christ out of your faith, nor think of as if it were the independent source of your salvation. Our life is found in "looking unto Jesus," not in looking to our own faith. By faith all things become possible to us; yet the power is not in the faith, but in the God upon whom faith relies. Grace is the powerful engine, and faith is the chain by which the carriage of the soul is attached to the great motive power. The righteousness of faith is not the moral excellence of faith, but the righteousness of Jesus Christ which faith grasps and appropriates. The peace within the soul is not derived from the contemplation of our own faith; but it comes to us from Him who is our peace, the hem of whose garment faith touches, and virtue comes out of Him into the soul.…... Think more of Him to whom you look than of the look itself. You must look away even from your own looking, and see nothing but Jesus, and the grace of God revealed in Him.

 

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

The Empty Tomb

A Mohommedan once said to a missionary:

"We have our Prophet's tomb to show,

but you have nothing."

Earth's Meccas and the faiths of men

Hold but a corpse within a tomb;

Each weary pilgrim's journey ends

At some sad shrine of grief and gloom.

Earth's prophets rest, in silence wrapped,

Dust in the dust from whence they came;

By Death's chill wind their torches quenched,

No more to kindle into flame.

Earth's priests in solemn splendour sleep,

Ashes to ashes, robed and stoled;

Their chanted prayers forever hushed,

Their altar fires forever cold.

Earth's kings in state and glory lie,

In crypts of porphyry encased;

Their names and deeds, in marble carved,

Time's blurring touch has half erased.

No mausoleum built by man

Entombs our Prophet, Priest and King;

Our love no pilgrimage need make,

No fading votive garlands bring.

No death could kill, no gaurd could keep,

No seal could stay, no grave could hold

Immortal Life in mortal clay;

No darkness could the Light enfold.

Our Prophet's word shall come to pass,

Our Priest is interceding still;

Our King shall reign forevermore,

While heaven and earth shall do his will.

"No grave to show"? This is the stone

On which the temples of our faith

Rise higher than the mosques of Ind;

Our Living Lord has counquered Death!

 

Annie Johnson Flint

Quote of the Day

…the doctrine of the Trinity says something that does not go beyond the first point but that underlines and clarifies it.  For it adds the claim that as God has revealed himself in Christ, so he is in himself.  What he does through his Son on earth reveals what he is like from eternity to eternity.  His revelation in the gospel tells us the ultimate truth about God's being and nature, or else it is not authentic revelation at all.  The love of the Father sending, empowering, guiding, and finally vindicating his Son, the love of the Son, coming, obeying, suffering, dying, are particular historical expressions of the love that eternally flows between Father and Son at the heart of the life of God.  The complex of relationships between Father, Son and Spirit are not just the means by which God communicates with us, they are an essential part of the content of that communication.  They are not just how he speaks, but part of what he says.  If these relationships are not of eternal significance, then the gospel itself is not of eternal significance.  That God not only acts in history as Father, Son and Spirit, but that he is in himself Father, Son and Spirit is the doctrine of the immanent or essential Trinity.

Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

And as he passed by he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the place of toll, and he saith unto him, Follow me.  And he arose and followed him. (Mark 2.14)"

The call goes forth, and is at once followed by the response of obedience.  The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus.  How could the call immediately evoke obedience?  The story is a stumbling-block for the natural reason, and it is no wonder that frantic attempts have been made to separate the two events.  By hook or by crook a bridge must be found between them.  Something must have happened in between, some psychological or historical event.  Thus we get the stupid question: Surely the publican must have known Jesus before, and that previous acquaintance explains his readiness to hear the Master's call.  Unfortunately our text is ruthlessly silent on this point, and in fact it regards the immediate sequence of call and response as a matter of crucial importance.  It displays not the slightest interest in the psychological reasons for a man's religious decisions.  And why?  For the simple reason that the cause behind the immediate following of call by response is Jesus Christ himself.  It is Jesus who calls, and because it is Jesus, Levi follows at once.  This encounter is a testimony to the absolute, direct, and unaccountable authority of Jesus…Jesus summons men to follow him not as a teacher or a pattern of the good life, but as the Christ, the Son of God.  In this short text Jesus Christ and his claim are proclaimed to men.  Not a word of praise is given to the disciple for his decision for Christ.  We are not expected to contemplate the disciple, but only him who calls, and his absolute authority.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote of the Day

 In the new Testament, as understood in the mainstream of Christian tradition, we meet the same God three times.  First of all we meet him in the Father, whom Jesus prayed to and obeyed, at whose bidding he came, lived, suffered and died, by whose hand he was raised from the dead.  But in Jesus Christ himself, we encounter the same divine love and power appearing personally among us as our fellowman.  God is now not only exalted in heaven but made man on earth.  The acts of Jesus are the acts of God, the words of Jesus are the words of God, the suffering of Jesus is the self-sacrifice of God, the person of Jesus is the person of God, so that the confession of the Church echoes the confession of Thomas (John 20:28) and addresses not the Father in heaven but the risen human Jesus, "My Lord and my God".  But with Jesus ascended there comes according to his promise allos Parakletos, "Another of the same kind of Advocate Counselor."  The Holy Spirit who keeps on relating Christians to Christ and the Father, and then to one another, is himself God, God at work in and among men.  He does not hand us over to another, but in this other he keeps on coming to us himself.

 

Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

Triumph, O my faith! All things are Christ's, and Christ is God's and God, Christ, and all things are thine. Time is his, and in it I have my numbered years; the air is his, and in it I breath; the world and on it I dwell; its fullness and I am fed; grace is his, and in it I stand; faith, and by it I overcome the world; tribulations are from him, and in them I glory; perfection is his, and towards it I press; death is his and by it  I arrive at home; heaven is his, and there is my mansion; eternity is his, and there is my treasure and glory.

James Meikle

Quote of the Day

Mathew 5:32 states: 'Every one who divorces his wife, except for the cause of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.' If with Erasmus we suppose that 'divorce' here means 'the complete dissolution of the marriage', the logic of this statement seems defective or at least unfair. For on this understanding Mathew 5:32a means that divorce with the right to remarry is only valid if the wife commits the particular sin of adultery.  Yet in other situations that result in divorce neither party can remarry as the unconditional statement of Mathew 5:32b declares.  Now if the sin of adultery results in the complete dissolution of the marriage, that allows both parties, the adulterous wife and the innocent husband, to remarry!  Dupont regards it as 'manifestly absurd' to allow a woman divorced for adultery to remarry, but to deny this right to a woman divorced for another reason.

This absurdity may be alleviated, as Dupont suggests, if one supposes that the divorced adulteress is refused the right of remarriage, but the innocent husband may remarry (=Erasmian view). But this is effectively to allow polygamy!  For if the woman cannot remarry she is not technically divorced, but separated. The marriage bond with her husband  still exists: that is why remarrying a divorced woman is adultery (5:32b).  Thus her former husband is really becoming a bigamist if he takes a second wife since the marital bond with his former spouse has not been dissolved.  The early church view, in contrast, leads to no such contradiction.  In no case is there the right of remarriage. Immorality may justify separation but not remarriage: in every case remarriage involves adultery.

William A. Heath and Gordan Wenham 

From their book "Jesus And Divorce: The Problem of the Evangelical Consensus"

Quote of the Day

STAYING SINGLE TO SHOW THE TRUTH.

Keep your marriage vows in such a way as to tell the truth about the unbreakable covenant love of Christ.  But to close this chapter, I want to emphasize that what Jesus says here in Mark 10:10-12 is incredibly good news - even to those who have been divorced and are remarried.  Here's why:  Jesus says, 'Don't divorce your spouse and marry someone else.  If you do, you've committed adultery."  Why is it adultery?  Ultimately, it is adultery because it betrays the truth about Christ that marriage is meant to display.  Jesus never, never does that to his bride, the church.  He never forsakes her.  He never abandons her.  He never abuses her.  He always loves her.  He always takes her back when she wanders.  He always is patient with her.  He always cares for her and provides for her and protects her and, wonder of wonders, delights in her.  And you - you who are married once, married five times, married never - if you repent and trust Christ - receive him as the Treasure who bore your punishment and became your righteousness - you are in the bride. And this is how he relates to you. ….The radical call of Jesus never to divorce and remarry is a declaration of the gospel by which people who have failed may be saved.  If  Christ were not this way, we would all be undone.  But this is how true, how faithful, how forgiving he is.  Therefore, we are saved.

John Piper

Quote of the Day

We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcase of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ.  It is true, of course, that we have paid the doctrine of pure grace divine honors unparalleled in Christendom, in fact we have exalted that doctrine to the position of God himself.   Everywhere Luther's formula has been repeated, but its truth perverted into self-deception.  So long as our Church holds the correct doctrine of justification, there is no doubt whatever that she is a justified Church!  So they said, thinking that we must vindicate our Lutheran heritage by making this grace available on the cheapest and easiest terms.  To be 'Lutheran' must mean that we leave the following of Christ to legalists, Calvinists, and enthusiasts - and all this for the sake of grace.  We justified the world, and condemned as heretics those who tried to follow Christ.  The result was that a nation became Christian and Lutheran, but at the cost of true discipleship.  The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap.   Cheap grace had won the day.

But do we also realize that this cheap grace has turned back upon us like a boomerang?  The price we are having to pay to-day in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost.  We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition.  Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving.  We poured forth unending streams of grace.  But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.  Where were those truths which impelled the early Church to institute the catechumenate, which enabled a strict watch to be kept over the frontier between the Church and the world, and afforded adequate protection for costly grace?  What had happened to all those warnings of Luther's against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living?  Was there ever a more terrible or disastrous instance of the Christianizing the world than this?  What are those three thousand Saxons put to death by Charlemagne compared with the millions of spiritual corpses in the country to-day?  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote of the Day

…in prayer the goal of the work of Son and Spirit is to introduce us to the Father and to establish us in fellowship with him.  So it follows from the nature of the gospel and life of the God it reveals that Christian prayer is properly and characteristically addressed to the Father.  What it says could not be said from the Son and the Spirit, but what both Son and Spirit have taught it to say is 'Our Father.  IF we do not find that right and natural, we need to ask ourselves why.  There is a type of protestant prayer that concentrates in an unhealthy way on Jesus, and that can easily become familiar and sentimental, because it has forgotten who Jesus is - the only Son of and the only way to the Father.  There is a Jesuology that can lavish an all too human love on an all too human Jesus and banish God to such remote transcendence, that we are back with the idea that we have to cling to a loving Jesus to keep us  right with a remote and probably angry God.  There is equally a prayer that concentrates on the Holy Spirit and the gifts and blessings he can bestow in a way that forgets that these things matter only when we use them to witness to the Son and to serve the Father in amore effective obedience.  To pray to Jesus rather than through him, to the Spirit rather than in him, as the established habit of our prayer, is to betray a doubt about our relationship to the Father.

Prayer is through Christ….in John 16..."I do not say I will ask the Father on your behalf."  He will not go instead of us, we are to come ourselves because the way is open.  Yet it is immediately clear that our ability to do so is entirely dependent on Christ and our relationship to him.  We do not come by ourselves, but it is we ourselves who come through him.  The same idea of mediation is implied in Hebrews 4:16.  Because he has gone into the holiest of all as High Priest we can "approach the throne of grace with confidence"…….It was into all this that Christ initiated his disciples when he said, "When you pray, say Abba,"…

 Thomas Smail

From his book, "The Forgotten Father"

His Robes For Mine

This is an excellent song! You can listen to it here:  http://www.sacredaudio.com/previews/player.php?id=1005_18  

His robes for mine: O wonderful exchange!
Clothed in my sin, Christ suffered ‘neath God’s rage.
Draped in His righteousness, I’m justified.
In Christ I live, for in my place He died.

Chorus:

I cling to Christ, and marvel at the cost:
Jesus forsaken, God estranged from God.
Bought by such love, my life is not my own.
My praise-my all-shall be for Christ alone.

His robes for mine: what cause have I for dread?
God’s daunting Law Christ mastered in my stead.
Faultless I stand with righteous works not mine,
Saved by my Lord’s vicarious death and life.

His robes for mine: God’s justice is appeased.
Jesus is crushed, and thus the Father’s pleased.
Christ drank God’s wrath on sin, then cried “‘Tis done!”
Sin’s wage is paid; propitiation won.

His robes for mine: such anguish none can know.
Christ, God’s beloved, condemned as though His foe.
He, as though I, accursed and left alone;
I, as though He, embraced and welcomed home!

- Written by Christ Anderson.  The sheet music can be purchased here:  http://www.bjupress.com/product/279752?path=169192&spot=1

Quote of the Day

In the new Testament, as understood in the mainstream of Christian tradition, we meet the same God three times.  First of all we meet him in the Father, whom Jesus prayed to and obeyed, at whose bidding he came, lived, suffered and died, by whose hand he was raised from the dead.  But in Jesus Christ himself, we encounter the same divine love and power appearing personally among us as our fellowman.  God is now not only exalted in heaven but made man on earth.  The acts of Jesus are the acts of God, the words of Jesus are the words of God, the suffering of Jesus is the self-sacrifice of God, the person of Jesus is the person of God, so that the confession of the Church echoes the confession of Thomas (John 20:28) and addresses not the Father in heaven but the risen human Jesus, "My Lord and my God".  But with Jesus ascended there comes according to his promise allos Parakletos, "Another of the same kind of Advocate Counselor."  The Holy Spirit who keeps on relating Christians to Christ and the Father, and then to one another, is himself God, God at work in and among men.  He does not hand us over to another, but in this other he keeps on coming to us himself.

- Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

If Jesus Christ is a Teacher only, then all He can do is to tantalize me by erecting a standard I can not attain. What is the use of presenting me with an ideal I cannot possibly come near? I am happier without knowing it. What is the good of telling me to be what I never can be--to be pure in heart, to do more than my duty, to be perfectly devoted to God?

I must know Jesus Christ as Savior before His teaching has any meaning for me other than that of an ideal which leads to despair. But when I am born again of the Spirit of God, I know that Jesus Christ did not come to teach only: He came to make me what He teaches I should be.

Oswald Chambers

Quote of the Day

…we have had in recent years a Jesus movement and a charismatic movement.  The one has almost disappeared and the other is threatening to run out of steam, perhaps because each is in a different way inadequate to the gospel, which his basically a Father movement.   It is not first a Jesuology (a doctrine about Jesus) or a pneumatology (a doctrine about the Spirit) but it is a theology or even a patrology - a doctrine about God the Father.  It starts not with the cross of Jesus or with the gift of the Spirit, but with the Father who so loved the World that he gave his Son in his Spirit.

Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

My song shall bless the Lord of all.
My praise shall climb to his abode ;
Thee, Saviour, by that name I call,
The great Supreme, the mighty God.

 Without beginning or decline,
Object of faith, and not of sense ;
Eternal ages saw him shine,
He shines eternal ages hence.

 As much, when in the manger laid,
Almighty ruler of the sky,
As when the six days' work he  made
Fill'd all the morning stars with joy.

 A cheerful confidence I feel,
My well-placed hopes with joy I see ;
My bosom glows with heavenly zeal,
To worship Him who died for me.

 As Man, he pities my complaint,
His power and truth are all divine ;
He will not fail, he cannot faint ;
Salvation's sure, and must be mine.

William Cowper

Quote of the Day

Unbelief looks at the difficulty. Faith regards the promise. Unbelief therefore makes our work a service of bondage. Faith realizes it as a “labour of love.” Unbelief drags on in sullen despondency. Faith makes the patience, with which it content to wait for success, “the patience of hope.” As every difficulty (as we have hinted,) is the fruit of unbelief; so will they all ultimately be overcome by the perseverance of faith. To gain therefore an active and powerful spring of renewed exertion, we must strike our roots deeper into the soil of faith. For the work will ever prosper or decline, as we depend upon an Almighty arm, or an arm of flesh. Few, probably, even of the most devoted servants of God, had duly counted the cost before they put their hand to the plough; and from the want of these preparatory exercises of faith, arises that oppressive faintness which gives the enemy such an advantage in distressing our peace, and enfeebling our exertions. But after all, the grand secret is habitually to have eye upon Christ. Peter–looking at the waves instead of the Saviour–”began to sink.” We too–if we look at the difficulties of our work, and forget the upholding arm of our ever-present Head–shall sink in despondency. Believe–wait–work–are the watchwords of the Ministry. Believing the promise, gives the power to wait. Waiting supplies strength for work, and such working “is not in vain in the Lord.

Charles Bridges

Quote of the Day

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. 

C. S. Lewis