Quote of the Day

Our task is not to help people see God favorably but to see him accurately.  God has the power to touch hearts and to draw people his love and grace while they fully affirm his holiness and justice...God has appointed us to faithfully deliver his message, not to compose and edit it.  He has already written the message - it's called the Bible.  Who are we to spin it and tame it , or presume to be more loving than Jesus, who with outrageous love took upon himself the horrific penalty from our sin?  God's position is already taken; we need not apply.   We do not own the Christian faith.  It isn't ours to revise.  God's Word wasn't entrusted to us so that we could give it away piece-meal, leaving the next generation with the leftovers.  If we go on decade after decade parceling out fragments of the faith, what will be left?  When we abandon truths Christians once died for, will we no longer have truths worth living for?

- Randy Alcorn
From the Forward to 'God Wins:  Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins' - by Mark Galli

Quote of the Day

The Gospel itself is the power of God unto salvation (Rom 1:16)…Since unbelief is at heart a moral, rather than an intellectual problem, no amount of evidences will ever turn unbelief to faith.  But the revealed Word of God has inherent power to do so…

John MacArthur

Quote of the Day

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.

C. S. Lewis

Quote of the Day

Holiness deals with the thoughts and intents, the purposes, the aims, the objects, the motives of men. Morality does but skim the surface, holiness goes into the very caverns of the great deep; holiness requires that the heart shall be set on God, and that it shall beat with love to him. The moral man may be complete in his morality without that.

Methinks I might draw such a parallel as this. Morality is a sweet, fair corpse, well washed and robed, and even embalmed with spices; but holiness is the living man, as fair and as lovely as the other, but having life. Morality lies there, of the earth, earthy, soon to be food for corruption and worms; holiness waits and pants with heavenly aspirations, prepared to mount and dwell in immortality beyond the stars. These twain are of opposite nature: the one belongs to this world, the other belongs to that world beyond the skies.

It is not said in heaven, "Moral, moral, moral art thou, O God!" but "Holy, holy. holy art thou. O Lord!" You note the difference between the two words at once. The one, how icy cold; the other, oh, how animated! Such is mere morality, and such is holiness! Moralist! — I know I speak to many such — remember that your best morality will not save you; you must have more than this, for without holiness — and that not of yourself, it must be given you of the Spirit of God — without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

 Love is the Queen of the Christian graces. It is a holy disposition given to us when we are born again by God. True spiritual love is characterized by meekness and gentleness, yet it is vastly superior to the courtesies and kindnesses of the flesh.

We must be careful not to confuse human sentimentality, carnal pleasantries, and human amiability with true spiritual love. The love God commands, first to Himself and then to others, is not human love. If we indulgently allow our children to grow up with little or, no Scriptural discipline, Proverbs plainly says we do not love them, regardless of the human sentimentality and affection we may feel for them. Love is not a sentimental pampering of one another with a loose indifference as to our walk and obedience before the Lord. Glossing over one another’s faults to ingratiate ourselves in their esteem is not spiritual love.

The true nature of Christian love is a righteous principle which seeks the highest good of others. The exercise of love is to be in strict conformity to the revealed will of God. We must love in the truth. Love among the brethren is far more than an agreeable society where views are the same. It is loving them for what we see of Christ in them, loving them for Christ’s sake.

The Lord Jesus Himself is our example. He was not only thoughtful, gentle, self-sacrificing and patient, but He also corrected His mother, used a whip in the Temple, severely scolded His doubting disciples, and denounced hypocrites. True spiritual love is above all faithful to God and uncompromising towards all that is evil. We cannot declare, ‘Peace and Safety’ when in reality there is spiritual decay and ruin!

True spiritual love is very difficult to exercise because it is not our natural love. By nature we would rather love sentimentally and engender good feelings. Also many times true spiritual love is not received in love, but is hated as the Pharisees hated it. We must pray that God will fill us with His love and enable us to exercise it without dissimulation toward all.

 

Arthur Pink

Quote of the Day

One admires Christ according to aesthetic categories as an aesthetic genius, calls him the greatest ethicist; one admires his going to his death as a heroic sacrifice for his ideas.  Only one thing one doesn't do: one doesn't take him seriously.  That is, one doesn't bring the center of his or her own life into contact with the claim of Christ to speak the revelation of God and to be that revelation.  One maintains  a distance between himself or herself and the word of Christ, and allows no serious encounter to take place.  I can doubtless live with or without Jesus as a religious genius, as an ethicist, as a gentleman - just as, after all, I can also live without Plato and Kant….Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ is not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me…understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously.  Understanding this claim means taking seriously his absolute claim on our commitment.  And it is now of importance for us to clarify the seriousness of this matter and to extricate Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote of the Day

True liberty consists only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.

 

Jonathan Edwards

Quote Of The Day

(On having a good conscience) That it be properly enlightened to know what is right and wrong, or that it be not under the dominion of ignorance, superstition, or fanaticism, prompting us to do what would be a violation of the Divine law… Without the first of these -- clear views of that which is right and wrong -- conscience becomes an unsafe guide, for it merely prompts us to do what we esteem to be right, and if our views of what is right and wrong are erroneous, we may be prompted to do what may be a direct violation of the law of God…Conscience is not revelation, nor does it answer the purpose of a revelation.  It communicates no new truth to the soul , and is a safe guide only so far as the mind has been properly enlightened to see what is truth and duty.  Its office is to prompt us to the performance of duty, not to determine what is right.

Albert Barnes