Quote of the Day

  When we turn from the restless entreaties and exhortations which fill the pages of our modern missionary magazines to the pages of the New Testament, we are astonished at the change in atmosphere. St Paul does not repeatedly exhort his churches to subscribe money for the propagation of the Faith, he is far more concerned to explain to them what the faith is, and how they ought to practice it and keep it.  The same is true of St Peter and St John, and all of the apostolic writers. They do not seem to feel any necessity to repeat the great Commission, and to urge that it is the duty of their converts to make disciples of all the nations. What we read in the New Testament is no anxious appeal to Christians to spread the Gospel, but a note here and there which suggests how the Gospel was being spread abroad: 'the churches were established in the faith and increased in number daily', 'in every place your faith to Godward is spread abroad so that we need not to speak anything', or as a result of a persecution: 'They that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the Word'......I know not how it may appear to others, but to me this unexhorted unorganized, spontaneous expansion has a charm far beyond that of our modern highly organized missions. I delight to think that a Christian travelling on his business, or fleeing from persecution, could preach Christ, and a church spring up as the result of his preaching, without his work being advertised through the streets of Antioch or Alexandria as the heading of an appeal to Christian men to subscribe funds to establish a school, or as the text of an exhortation to the church of his native city to send a mission, without which new converts deprived of guidance must inevitably lapse. I suspect, however, that I am not alone in this strange preference, and that many others read their Bibles and find there with relief a welcome escape from our material appeals for funds, and from our methods of moving heaven and earth to make a proselyte......

The Spirit of Christ is a Spirit who longs for, and strives after, the salvation of the souls of men, and that Spirit dwells in them. That Spirit converts the natural instinct into a longing for the conversion of others which is indeed divine in its source and character.

- Roland Allen

From his book: The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church

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Quote of the Day

"Snacking (on isolated verses in the Bible) hides things to be sure, but it also distorts the things it does show us.  For example, ,the Snacking Bible is not great news. It has gospel verses, but no gospel, because the gospel is the announcement of a particular turn of events within an ongoing story.  The gospel is not a sentence about justification by faith or a verse reference on the forgiveness of my sins.  The gospel is not the Romans Road.  The gospel is not John 3:16.  What the apostles Paul and John wrote - what God's Spirit enkindled in them - was something entirely different than these boiled-down reductions.  Evangelist D. L. Moody said he could write the gospel on a dime.  Well, Paul and John couldn't, and didn't."

- Glenn R. Pauuw

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Tell F. that I am surprised at his going to a separate church because of choir attractions.  What is the use of his complaining of ritualism and so on, if he does not practice what he preaches?  For myself, I had enough of musical services in Stratford, and want no more.  Where are we told in the Bible that 'the choir is the power of God unto salvation'? And when men try to preach the Gospel which is the power of God unto salvation, it offends fastidious tastes for its plain-spokenness. Oh that we English people thought less about the messenger and more about the glorious message!

 

Thomas Walker

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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

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God indeed may be reconciled to the sinner, but never to the sin.

 

Stephen Charnock

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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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‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎The mind of God is greater than all the minds of men, so let all men leave the gospel just as God has delivered it unto us.

  

Charles Spurgeon

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If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.

Augustine

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…the number of people who suffer from such newly identified "sicknesses" is increasing even faster.  The therapy industry is clearly not solving the problem of what Scripture calls sin. Instead it merely convinces multitudes that they are desperately sick and therefore not really responsible for their wrong behavior.  It gives them permission to think of themselves as patients, not malefactors.  And it encourages them to undergo extensive - and expensive- treatment that lasts for years, or better yet, for a lifetime.  These new diseases, it seems, are ailments from which no one is ever expected to recover completely……Recovery, the code word for programs modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, is explicitly marketed as a lifelong program.  We've grown accustomed to the image of a person who has been sober for forty years standing up in an A A meeting and saying, "I'm Bill, and I'm an alcoholic."  Now all "addicts" are using the same approach - including sex addicts, gambling addicts, nicotine addicts, anger addicts, wife-beating addicts, child-molesting addicts,  debt addicts, eat addicts, or whatever.  People suffering from such maladies are taught to speak of themselves as "recovering" never "recovered."  Those who dare to think of themselves as delivered from their affliction are told they are living in denial….. Disease model therapy therefore feeds the very problem it is supposed to treat. It alleviates any sense of guilt, while making people feel they are victims helplessly bound for life to their affliction….(it)is disastrously counterproductive.  By casting the sinner in the role of a victim, it ignores or minimizes the personal guilt inherent in misbehavior.  "I am sick" is much easier to say than, "I have sinned."  But it doesn't deal with the fact that one's transgression is a serious offense against a holy, omniscient, omnipotent God.  Personal guilt is for that very reason at the heart of what must be confronted when dealing with one's sin.  But the disease-model remedy cannot address the problem of guilt without explaining it away.  And by explaining guilt away, disease-model therapy does untold violence to the human conscience.  It is therefore no remedy at all, but a disastrous prescription for escalating wickedness and eternal damnation.

John Macarthur 

Quote of the Day

Today it is true almost everywhere, that we are far more concerned about the results of the gospel than we are about the purity of it! We are more concerned in the blessing of man than we are about the glory of Christ! Is not that true? Is it not true that the first great question asked everywhere today is, what are the 'results? What is the fruitage? How many people have been saved in your church last year? I am not saying that the question has no importance, but I do say that, if that is the first question that is asked, it only shows what a low level we are living on! The first question we ought to ask is, How scripturally is the gospel being preached in your church? Is the preacher magnifiying Christ? Is the preacher emphasizing the absolute sufficiency of his finished work? Does the preacher make it plain that God does not ask the sinner to do anything, that Christ has done all for him?

Ah, my friends, when the preachers today are tested by that, there are mighty few of them that will survive the test. How many are there today who tell the poor sinner that he has got to give his heart to God! Well, you say, isn't that right? Isn't that true? Must not the sinner give his heart to the Lord if he is going to be saved? Oh, the tragedy that such a question has to be asked! We talk about progress and advancing; why, we need indoctrinating in the ABC of the gospel! No, my friends, no sinner was ever saved by giving his heart to God. We are not saved by our giving, we are saved by God's giving. Well, but doesn't it say in Scripture, 'Son, give me thine heart'? Yes, it does, but that is not addressed to an unconverted sinner, that is addressed to a son! After God has saved you by grace alone, then your first duty is to dedicate yourself to his service, to give your heart to him, to be used by him as he wills and where he wills and when he wills, and to realize that you are no more your own but the purchased property of another. .....

Arthur W. Pink

Quote of the Day

Yea, "new every morning," though we may awake,

Our hearts with old sorrow beginning to ache;

With old work unfinished when night stayed our hand,

With new duties waiting, unknown and unplanned;

With old care still pressing, to fret and to vex,

With new problems rising, ours minds to perplex;

In ways long familiar, in paths yet untrod,

Oh, new every morning the mercies of God!

His faithfulness fails not; it meets each new day

With guidance for every new step of the way;

New grace for new trials, new trust for old fears,

New patience for bearing the wrongs of the years,

New strength for new burdens, new courage for old,

New faith for whatever the day may unfold;

As fresh for each need as the dew on the sod;

Oh, new every morning the mercies of God!

Annie Johnson Flint

Quote of the Day

The brilliance of the gospel light is dimmed by error. The clearness of the testimony is spoiled when doubtful voices are scattered among the people, and those who ought to preach the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, are telling out for doctrines the imaginations of men, and the inventions of the age.

Instead of revelation, we have philosophy, falsely so-called; instead of divine infallibility, we have surmises and larger hopes. The gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, is taught as the production of progress, a growth, a thing to be amended and corrected year by year. It is an ill day, both for the church and the world, when the trumpet does not give a certain sound; for who shall prepare himself for the battle?

 

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

Men hold truths nowadays with the bowels taken out of then, and the very life and meaning torn away. There are members and ministers of evangelical denominations who do not believe evangelical doctrine, or if they do believe it they attach but little importance to it; their sermons are essays on philosophy, tinged with the gospel. They put a quarter of a grain of gospel into an Atlantic of talk, and poor souls are drenched with words to no profit. God save us from ever leaving the old gospel, or losing its spirit, and the solid comfort which it brings...

Charles Spurgeon

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

Have we - I speak to those of us who are committed Christians - have we forgotten that God's power is more clearly seen in the message of the Cross than in any political or social plan we might devise?  Might not our search for some antidote to our grevious ills be symptomatic of our lost confidence in the power of the gospel to change people from the inside out?  Do we cling to the cross with the deep conviction that it is not simply a part of our message to the world, but rightly understood it is the whole of it?.....In an effort to be "relevant" we now face the temptation of being diverted from our mission and becoming involved doing what is good while bypassing what is best….

Our Two Dangers

In our desperate moment in history we face two dangers.  The first is to say that we must retreat from our cultural and political battles to be true to the supremacy of the cross.  This view point is right in emphasizing that our primary mission is to preach the gospel, but it fails because we end up preaching to ourselves…Those older fundamentalists were right in holding to the centrality of the Christian message but wrong in teaching that he Christian faith could be lived in isolation from the culture and its institutions.  Thus the cross, though exalted among the faithful, was hidden from the world.

The second danger is that we become so overburdened with social/political agendas that our message is lost amid these cultural skirmishes.  The church has always faced the temptation to modify the gospel or make it secondary to a given political, philosophical, or cultural agenda.  When this happens, Christians have exposure to the culture, but the cross does not.  Again hidden.

Jacques Ellul, in The Subversion of Christianity, wrote, "Each generation thinks it has finally discovered the truth…Christianity becomes an empty bottle that successive cultures fill with all kinds of things."  Regrettably, the Christian bottle has been filled with many different agendas.  Early in the history of the church, the Cross was obscured by sacramentalism, the idea that salvation was a grace given through the rituals of the church.  Salvation was not longer a personal relationship with God, but was reduced to partnership with the ecclesiastical structure.  The bottle w was emptied and filled with liturgy that could never bring a soul to God.  The Cross became an ornament hung around the neck, not an instrument that changed the heart.

Rationalism and humanism arose in the eighteenth century, the fruits of the Enlightenment.  Religion, it insisted, must conform to our understanding.  Whatever seemed contrary to our sensibilities was eliminated.  Miracles, for example, were discounted as being out of sync with the enlightened cultural mind - set.  The Unitarians argued that God was too good to send man to hell, and the Universalists believed man was too good to be sent there.  The Cross became a symbol of sentimental love, not the means by which Christ shed His blood to reconcile men to God.

Today the bottle of Christianity is often filled with physiology.  Since Freud, the need for a religious conversion has been eliminated.  Secular psychology denies that man fell from some previous state of holiness.  Since he has not fallen, he has no need to be picked up, at least not by God.  Salvation is simply a matter of having a healthy self-image.  The cross of Christ is a symbol of man's alienation from himself; a reminder that man must be reconciled to who he already is.

The New Age movement, in combining Christianity with any number of Eastern/occultic ideas ignores the Cross altogether.  At best it is a symbol of self-awareness, a reminder of our need to get in touch with the world beyond us.  According to this movement the Cross does not humiliate us; it exalts us.

Some political activists have filled the Christian bottle with a strategy for political reform.  Salvation, it appears, is electing conservatives to national and local office.  Important though this might be, we must always remember that God is neither Republican nor Democrat.  When the Cross is wrapped in the flag of a political party, it is always distorted or diminished.  Even for some who have experienced its power, the Cross has become an addendum to what is thought to be more pressing agendas.

……Ultimately the ballot box cannot save us; only God can.  And the Cross is the centerpiece of His agenda.  Only when the Cross stands alone, unencumbered with other religions, philosophies, or political ideologies, does it retain its power.

Erwin Lutzer

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.

Quote of the Day

 Did Jesus satisfy God’s justice on the cross? Or do we satisfy God’s justice when we believe?

Michael Horton

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Where is it said (in the Bible) that Christ doth intercede for men that they may have faith if they do such and such things? Nay, what condition can rationally be assigned this desire?  Some often intimate that it is," if they suffer the Spirit to have his work upon their hearts, and obey the grace of God." Now, what is it to obey the grace of God? Is it not to believe? Therefore it seems that Christ intercedeth for them that they may believe, upon condition that they do believe.(!)

John Owen

Quote Of The Day

An evil is in the professed camp of the Lord, so gross in its impudence, that the most shortsighted can hardly fail to notice it during the past few years. It has developed at an abnormal rate, even for evil. It has worked like leaven until the whole lump ferments. The devil has seldom done a cleverer thing than hinting to the church that part of their mission is to provide entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them. 

From speaking out as the Puritans did, the church has gradually toned down her testimony, then winked at and excused the frivolities of the day. Then she tolerated them in her borders. Now she has adopted them under the plea of reaching the masses.

My first contention is that providing amusement for the people is nowhere spoken of in the Scriptures as a function of the church. If it is a Christian work, why did not Christ speak of it? "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). That is clear enough. So it would have been if He had added, "and provide amusement for those who do not relish the gospel." No such words, however, are to be found. It did not seem to occur to him.

Then again, "He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some evangelists; and some pastors and teachers .., for the work of the ministry" (Eph. 4:11-12). Where do entertainers come in? The Holy Spirit is silent concerning them. Were the prophets persecuted because they amused the people or because they refused? The concert has no martyr roll. 

Again, providing amusement is in direct antagonism to the teaching and life of Christ and all his apostles. What was the attitude of the church to the world? Ye are the salt" (Matt. 5:13), not the sugar candy---something the world will spit out not swallow. Short and sharp was the utterance, "Let the dead bury their dead" (Matt. 8:22) He was in awful earnestness.

Had Christ introduced more of the bright and pleasant elements into his mission, he would have been more popular when they went back, because of the searching nature of His teaching. I do not hear him say, "Run after these people Peter and tell them we will have a different style of service tomorrow, something short and attractive with little preaching. We will have a pleasant evening for the people. Tell them they will be sure to enjoy it. Be quick Peter, we must get the people somehow." Jesus pitied sinners, sighed and wept over them, but never sought to amuse them.

In vain will the Epistles be searched to find any trace of this gospel of amusement! Their message is, "Come out, keep out, keep clean out!" Anything approaching fooling is conspicuous by its absence. They had boundless confidence in the gospel and employed no other weapon.

After Peter and John were locked up for preaching, the church had a prayer meeting but they did not pray, "Lord grant unto thy servants that by a wise and discriminating use of innocent recreation we may show these people how happy we are." If they ceased not from preaching Christ, they had not time for arranging entertainments. Scattered by persecution, they went everywhere preaching the gospel. They turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6). That is the only difference! Lord, clear the church of all the rot and rubbish the devil has imposed on her, and bring us back to apostolic methods.

Lastly, the mission of amusement fails to effect the end desired. It works havoc among young converts. Let the careless and scoffers, who thank God because the church met them halfway, speak and testify. Let the heavy laden who found peace through the concert not keep silent! Let the drunkard to whom the dramatic entertainment has been God's link in the chain of the conversion, stand up! There are none to answer. The mission of amusement produces no converts. The need of the hour for today's ministry is believing scholarship joined with earnest spirituality, the one springing from the other as fruit from the root. The need is biblical doctrine, so understood and felt, that it sets men on fire.

Charles Spurgeon