Quote of the Day

Dear Brothers and Sisters, honor the Spirit of God as you would honor Jesus Christ if He were present! If Jesus Christ not there! Do not ignore the Presence of the Holy Spirit in your soul! I beseech you, do not live as if you had not heard whether there were a Holy Spirit. To Him pay your constant adorations. Reverence the august Guest who has been pleased to make your body His sacred abode. Love Him, obey Him, worship Him!

Take care never to impute the vain imaginings of your fancy to Him. I have seen the Spirit of God shamefully dishonored by persons—I hope they were insane—who have said that they have had this and that revealed to them. There has not, for some years, passed over my head a single week in which I have not been pestered with the revelations of hypocrites or maniacs. Semi-lunatics are very fond of coming with messages from the Lord to me and it may save them some trouble if I tell them once and for all that I will have none of their stupid messages. When my Lord and Master has any message to me He knows where I am and He will send it to me direct, and not by mad-caps!  

Never dream that events are revealed to you by Heaven, or you may come to be like those idiots who dare impute their blatant follies to the Holy Spirit. If you feel your tongue itch to talk nonsense, trace it to the devil, not to the Spirit of God! Whatever is to be revealed by the Spirit to any of us is in the Word of God already—He adds nothing to the Bible, and never will. Let persons who have revelations of this, that, and the other, go to bed and wake up in their senses.

Charles Spurgeon

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By elevating the authority of experience over the authority of Scripture, the Charismatic Movement has destroyed the church's immune system - uncritically granting free access to every imaginable form of heretical teaching and practice.

John MacArthur

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If I thought I it wrong to be a Baptist, I should give it up, and become what I believed to be right.  The particular doctrine adhered to by Baptists is that they acknowledge no authority unless it comes from the Word of God.  They attach no importance to the authority of the Fathers - they care not for the authority of the mothers - if what they say does not agree with the teaching of the Evangelists, Apostles, and Prophets, and most of all, with the teaching of the Lord Himself.  If we could find infant baptism in the Word of God, we should adopt it.  It would help us out of a great difficulty, for it would take away from us that reproach which is attached to us - that we are odd, and do not as other people do.  But we have looked well through the Bible, and cannot find it, and do not believe that it is there; nor do we believe that others can find infant baptism in the Scriptures, unless they themselves first put it there.

Charles Spurgeon

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Both Arminians and hyper-Calvinists demanded that theology conform to a narrowly defined system more restricted than the biblical revelation allowed.  Scripture conforms to a higher logic than human intellect and can penetrate and unveils mysteries beyond the scope of construction by mere human ratiocination.

 "It has been my earnest endeavor ever since I have preached the Word, never to keep back a single doctrine which I believed to be taught of God  It is time that we had done with the old rusty systems that have so long curbed the freeness of religious speech.  The Arminian trembles to go an inch beyond Arminius or Wesley, and many a Calvinist refers to John Gill or John Calvin as an ultimate authority, It is time that the systems were broken up, and that there was sufficient grace in all our hearts to believe everything taught in God's Word, whether it was taught by either of these men or not.  I have frequently found when I have preached what is called high doctrine, because I found it in my text, that some people have been offended; they could not enjoy it, could not endure it , and went away.  They were generally people who were best gone; I have never regretted their absence.  On the other hand, when I have taken for my text some sweet invitation, and have preached the freeness of Christ's love to man; when I have warned sinners that they are responsible while they hear the gospel, and that if they reject Christ their blood will be upon their own heads, I find another class of doubtless excellent individuals who cannot see how these two things agree.  And therefor also turn aside, and wade into the deceptive miry bogs of antinomianism.  I can only say with regard to them, that I had rather also that they should go to their own sort, than that they should remain with my congregation.  We seek to hold truth.  We know no difference between high doctrine and low doctrine.  If God teaches it, it is enough.  If it is not in the Word, away with it!  Away with it!  But if it be in the Word, agreeable or disagreeable, systematic or disorderly, I believe it.  It may seem to us as if one truth stood in opposition to another, but we are fully convinced that it cannot be so, that it is a mistake in our judgment.  That the two things do agree we are quite clear, though where they meet we do not know as yet, but hope to know hereafter."

 

Charles Spurgeon as quoted in Living by Revealed Truth:  The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon by Thomas Nettles

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Let it not be objected to this rigid adherence to the language of Scripture, that better and more learned men have not thought it needful, and that we may safely trust a little to their good sense and piety.  For, in conflict with scriptural powers, this scrupulous adherence will be found our only safety.  The Church of Rome may possibly dispense with the Bible, having Trent for doctrine, her anathemas for reproof, her inquisition for correction in righteousness, and her infallible pontiff for instruction in righteousness.  But with us, all these purposes must be served by Scriptures.

Charles Maitland

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...But the Charismatic movement can't be defined doctrinally. Why? Because it involves Pentecostals, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, anybody and everybody. So it resists and has resisted any kind of doctrinal definition that is too rigid.

 

What they all hold in common is an experience which they will call the baptism of the Holy Spirit and they, wrongly, define the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a post-salvation experience that adds something to your Christian life that you previously didn't have and is usually accompanied by signs and wonders, most particularly, speaking in tongues. And we're going to talk much more about the baptism of the Holy Spirit in tongues at a later time…….

 

Paul was no Charismatic either, believe me. Paul was no Charismatic. He made divine truth the beginning and the ending of his ministry. It was the preaching of the truth revealed to him by the Spirit of God. Acts 17:2, "According to Paul's custom, he went to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and saying, 'This Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you is the Christ.'" He was explaining the Scripture, he was delineating the Scripture. He had an experience. He went to Heaven! But God said, "You are not allowed to," what? "You're not allowed to talk about it." "I don't want anybody basing anything on your interpretation, on your experience." Paul never built his ministry on his visions, his experiences. He built it on what he knew was the revealed truth of God, and he called into question any experience that violated Scripture.

 

The end of his ministry in the 28 Acts, we find him at lodge, and people were there in large numbers; and he was explaining to them by solemnly testifying about the kingdom of God, and trying to persuade them concerning Jesus, from both the Law of Moses and from the Prophets, from morning until evening. He was in the Scripture trying to prove the truth from the pages of the Word of God.

 

Charismatics, like Jews of Paul's day have zeal without knowledge. Enthusiasm without enlightenment. They are often approaching truth without their minds, without thinking. Some even claim that God deliberately gives people unintelligible tongues in order to bypass and thus humble the proud human intellect. Beloved, this is a serious and tragic error.

 

John Macarthur

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 No article of faith may be based on any noncanonical work, regardless of its religious value. 

The divinely inspired and authoritative books are the sole basis for doctrine and practice.  Whatever complimentary support canonical truth derives from other books, it in no way lends canonical value to those books.  The support is purely historical and has no authoritative theological value.  The truth of inspired Scripture alone is the canon or foundation of the truths of faith.

- From the book From God to Us:  How We Got our Bible - by Norman Geisler and William Nix

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…a study which is exclusively practical and devotional is necessarily imperfect.  There are many things in Scripture which do not lend themselves to an immediate practical purpose, and which in fact are as good as shut out from the circle of ordinary Bible-reading.  I know that good people often try to hide this fact from themselves by hooking on some sort of lesson to passages which they do not understand, or which do not directly touch any spiritual chord.  There is very respectable precedent for this course, which in fact is nothing else than the method of topical  exegesis that reigned supreme in the Old Catholic and Medieval Church.  The ancient fathers laid down the principle that everything in Scripture which, taken in its natural sense, appears unedifying must be made edifying by some method of typical or figurative application.  In principle this is no longer admitted in the Protestant Churches (unless perhaps for the Song of Solomon), but in practice we still get over many difficulties by tacking on a lesson which is  not really taken out of the difficult passage, but read into from some other part of Scripture.  People satisfy themselves in this way, but they do not solve the difficulty.  Let us be frank with ourselves, and admit that there are many things in Scripture in which unsystematic and merely devotional reading finds no profit.

 

William Robertson Smith

I do not agree with his stance on the Old Testament(higher criticism)

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We may if we please, confine our study of Scripture to what is immediately edifying, skimming lightly over all pages which do not serve a direct purpose of devotion, and ignoring every difficulty which does not yield to the faculty of practical insight, to the power of spiritual sympathy with the mind of the Spirit, which the thoughtful Christian necessarily acquires in the habitual excessive of bringing Scripture to bear on the daily needs of his own life.  This use of Scripture is full of personal profit, and raises no intellectual difficulties.  But it does not do justice to the whole Word of God.  It cannot exhaust the whole mind of the Spirit.  It is limited for every individual by the limitations of his own spiritual experience.  Reading the Bible in this way, a man comes to a very personal appreciation of so much of God's truth as is in immediate contact with the range of his own life.  But he is sure to miss many truths which belong to another range of experience, and to read into the inspired page things from his own experience which involve human error.  In this way he becomes narrow, and full of prejudice, which prevent him from seeing that the Bible is larger than his knowledge of it, and that other men whose needs are different from his may be quite in the right in getting things out of the Scripture which he does not know, does not need, and is inclined to call false or dangerous.  

William Robertson Smith

(Disclaimer:  his stance in his writings on higher criticism is wrong)

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I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed it—His Word. He alone has the power to change lives for eternity, and that power is focused on the Scriptures.

R. C. Sproul

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Calvin believed that biblical preaching must occupy the chief place in the worship service.  What God has to say to man is infinitely more important than what man has to say to God.  If the congregation is to worship properly, if believers are to be edified, if the lost are to be converted, God's Word must be exposited.  Nothing must crowd the Scriptures out of the chief place in the public gathering.

Steven Lawson

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A sacred regard to the authority of God ought to lead us to

reject an error, however old, sanctioned by whatever authority,

or however generally practiced.

 

Charles Spurgeon

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There is one further feature of Dr. Lloyd-Jones' preaching which needs to be added.  It was customary among evangelical Christians at this date to encourage the practice of giving 'testimonies' as a form of evangelistic witness…For one thing, he noticed that the giving testimonies tended to reduce all conversions to a similar pattern to standardize experience in away which went beyond Scripture.  And yet, at the same time, testimony-givers were prone to emphasize what made their story noteworthy.  No doubt the motives were often well intentioned, but the effect could easily be carnal and man-centered.  Hearers readily became impressed with the dramatic and unique features of a story, instead of with the grace of God which is identical in every conversion…….

He knew that the argument from experience could be matched by the claims and apparent results of other 'gospels'.  Do Christians claim to have obtained happiness and deliverance from fears?  So do the converts to Christian science and to other cults.  'Our case,' he was never to tire of saying, 'is not based upon experience, it is based upon great external facts.'  The business of preaching is the proclamation of the revealed truths of gospel history - truths indeed confirmed by experience, but independent of experience in their objective reality.  

- From Iain Murray's two volume biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1st Volume)

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How did the early Church ever function without the “expertise” we have today? Yet those Christians turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6), and they did it without any celebrity testimonies, without modern management techniques, without psychotherapy, without mass media, and without most of the means the contemporary church seems to view as essential. All they had was God’s Word and the power of His Spirit, but they knew that was sufficient.

John Macarthur

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Inigo, instead of feeling that his remorse was sent to drive him to the foot of the cross, persuaded himself that these inward reproaches proceeded not from God, but from the devil; and he resolved never more to think of his sins, to erase them from his memory, and bury them in eternal oblivion. Luther turned towards Christ, Loyola only fell back upon himself. 

Visions came erelong to confirm Inigo in the conviction at which he had arrived.  His own resolves had become a substitute for the grace of the Lord; his own imaginings supplied the place of God's Word.  He had looked upon the voice of God in his conscience as the voice of the devil; and accordingly the remainder of his history represents him as given up to the inspirations of the spirit of darkness…….These numerous apparitions had removed all doubts; he believed, not like Luther because the things of faith were written in the Word of God, but because of the visions he had seen.  "Even had there been no Bible," say his apologists, "even had these mysteries never been revealed in Scripture, he would have believed them, for God had appeared to him."  Luther, on taking his doctor's degree, had pledged his oath to Holy Scripture, and the only infallible authority of the Word of God had become the fundamental principle of the Reformation.  Loyola, at this time, bound himself to dreams and visions; and chimerical apparitions became the principle of his life and of his faith.

 

Jean Henri Merle D'aubigne

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If you don't have the meaning of Scripture, you do not have the Word of God at all.  If you miss the true sense of what God has said, you are not actually preaching His Word! 

John MacArthur

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And yet some people actually imagine that the revelation in God’s Word is not enough to meet our needs. They think that God from time to time carries on an actual conversation with them, chatting with them, satisfying their doubts, testifying to His love for them, promising them support and blessings. As a result, their emotions soar; they are full of bubbling joy that is mixed with self-confidence and a high opinion of themselves. The foundation for these feelings, however, does not lie within the Bible itself, but instead rests on the sudden creations of their imaginations. These people are clearly deluded. God’s Word is for all of us and each of us; He does not need to give particular messages to particular people.

 

Jonathan Edwards

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It is the Word that prunes the Christian, it is the truth that purges him, the Scripture made living and powerful by the Holy Spirit-effectually cleanses the Christian. Affliction is the handle of the knife - affliction is the grindstone that sharpens the Word - affliction is the dresser that removes our soft garments and lays bear the diseased flesh, so that the surgeon's knife may get at it - affliction merely makes us ready to feel the Word - but the true prune is the Word, in the hand of the Great Vinedresser.

 Charles Spurgeon

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Think of reading like you think of eating.  In other words, pay attention to your diet.  For the Christian, the highest reading priority is the Word of God.  Our spiritual maturity will never exceed our knowledge of the Bible.

 

Albert Mohler