Quote of the Day

Everything we encounter today is used by God to prepare us for tomorrow. he wastes no trials, withholds no blessings, nor does he hold back  on the discipline of his soldiers.  All he does prepares us for future usefulness as vessels of honor.

- From Polycarp: a destroyer of our gods - by Rick Lambert

Quote of the Day

We get endless sermons on psychology, but amazingly few on Christianity.  Our preachers are afraid to preach on the doctrine of the Atonement and on predestination.  The great cardinal principles of our belief are scarcely ever mentioned, indeed there is a movement on foot to amend them so as to bring them up-to-date.  How on earth can you talk of bringing these eternal truths up to date?  They are not only up-to-date, they are and will be ahead of the times to all eternity.

 

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Quote of the Day

Consider what thou owest to His (God's)immutability. Though thou hast changed a thousand times, He has not changed once; though thou hast shifted thy intentions, and thy will, yet He has not once swerved from His eternal purpose, but has still held thee fast.

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

The Bible assuredly knows nothing of those qualms about good works, by which we only try to excuse ourselves and justify our evil works.  The Bible never draws the antithesis between faith and good works so sharply as to maintain that good works undermine faith.  No, it is evil works rather than good works which hinder and destroy faith.  Grace and active obedience are complementary.  There is no faith without good works, and no good works apart from faith….But all our good works are the works of God himself, the works for which he has prepared for us beforehand.  Good works then are ordained for the sake of salvation, but they are in the end those which God himself works within us.  They are his gift, but it is our task to walk in them at every moment of our lives, knowing all the time that any good works of our own could never help  us to abide before the judgment of God.  We cling in faith to Christ and his works alone.  For we have the promise that those who are in Christ Jesus will be enabled to do good works, which will testify for them in the day of judgment.  They will be preserved and sanctified until the last day…From this it follows that we can never be conscious of our good works.  Our sanctification is veiled from our eyes until the last day, when all secrets will be disclosed.  IF we want to see some results here and assess our own spiritual state, and have not the patience to wait, we have our reward.  The moment we begin to feel satisfied that we are making some progress on the road of sanctification, it is all the more necessary to repent and confess that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.  Yet the Christian life is not one of gloom, but of ever increasing joy in the Lord.   God alone knows our good works, all we know is His good work……The believer will be justified, the justified will be sanctified and the sanctified will be saved in the day of judgment…The fruit of their liberation from sin through the death of Christ is that whereas they once surrendered their members as servants to iniquity, they may now use them in the service of righteousness unto sanctification (Rom.6:19-22)  ……How does this come to pass?...How can the sinner become righteous without impairing the righteousness of God?  The answer is that God justified himself by appearing as his own advocate in defense of his own righteousness……The justification of the sinner therefore consists in the sole righteousness of God, wheirin the sinner is utterly and completely unrighteous, and has no righteousness whatever of his own, side by side with the righteousness of God.  Whenever we desire an independent righteousness of our own we are forfeiting our only chance of justification, which is through God and his righteousness, God alone is righteous….The ground  for our justifcation is the justification of God.  "That thou [i.e. God] mightest be justified in thy words, and mightest prevail when thou comest to judgement" (Rom. 3:4).  All that matters is that God's righteousness should prevail over ours, that God's righteousness should be maintained in His own eyes, and that he alone should be righteous.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote of the Day

Of them(the Jews) God thus spake hundreds of years before the destruction of Jerusalem: "I will scatter you among the heathen:" "Thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among the all nations, whither the Lord shall lead thee:" "Among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest." 

Jerusalem has been "trodden under foot," literally and terribly, till now, by the iron heels of western Christians, who deluged it with blood, by the hoofs of Arab and Moslem horsemen, and by the bare feet of Greek, and Roman, and Armenian monks.  Each sect spared its rival in order to crush the Jew.  To plunder and maltreat the Jew was regarded as the expression of a piety singularly acceptable to God.  No experience of man can explain this.  The Jew is a living mystery, which prophecy alone clears up.

Many other predictions, intimate the destinies of this mysterious race till Christ come.  All nations have homes in Jerusalem, - the Jew has none.  They have been sifted through all nations, and have taken root in none.  They  are the subjects of every dynasty - the victims of every tyranny - the scoff of the infidel - the scorn of the great.  From the Thames to the Tiber, and from the Tiber to the Ganges, and from the Ganges to the Missouri - from "Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand" - they are found insulated from the sympathies of all men, indicating affinities with something above and before, but with nothing around.  That once great nation has been poured down upon the earth like quicksilver - it has split into innumerable scattered and disintegrated globules, which the Great Proprietor will yet collect, and form into a mighty mass that shall glow with imperishable splendor and reflect his glory.  Many thousand years ago, God in prophecy pronounced the future dispersion and doom of the Jews, and God in history has kept them like the bush on Horeb - burning and not consumed - till that day come when the glory shall return from between the cherubim, and the dry bones rush together from a thousand lands, and the groans of creation, and the oppression of the Jew, and the travail of the Christian, cease together.  Do we not hear every morning a deep-toned voice in our streets? It is the echo of the voice of God in prophecy - evidence to a skeptic world that God's word is truth.  No man can read the history of the Jews, and the prophecy of which that history is the shadow projected into many years and lands, and not conclude that the prescience of God pronounced the prediction, and that the presence of God in history superintends its fulfillment.

John Cumming

Quote of the Day

1. Father, long before creation

Thou hadst chosen us in love,

And that love so deep, so moving,

Draws us close to Christ above.

Still it keeps us, still it keeps us

Firmly fixed in Christ alone.

2. Though the world may change its fashion,

Yet our God is e'er the same;

His compassion and His covenant

Through all ages will remain.

God's own children,

God's own children

Must forever praise His name.

3. God's compassion is my story,

Is my boasting all the day;

Mercy free and never failing

Moves my will, directs my way.

God so loved us,

God so loved us

That His only Son He gave.

4. Loving Father now before Thee

We will ever praise Thy love,

And our songs will sound unceasing

'Til we reach our home above,

Giving glory,

giving glory

To our God and to the Lamb.

Chinese Hymn written in c. 1952 during the Cultural Revolution, a time of brutal persecution for Chinese Christians.