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

Soon after I stopped feeling this intense love and presence of God, I started grasping for things that normally brought that passion back.  I would drive almost an hour away to find churches with great worship bands and speakers……I knew on some level that there was something off about the way I was approaching this, but I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to get that feeling back.  And then one day it struck me:  my faith had stopped being about God and had become about how I felt.  That was really selfish of me.  It shouldn't have mattered how I felt if I trusted that God was real.  At that point the best thing for someone like me was to remove those feelings so that my faith would once again become about God, not myself. ….the end result was that I began learning how  to center my life around God with or without the feelings that I once had…….To make Christianity purely about feelings is to make it about ourselves rather than God.  God doesn't promise to constantly flood us with intense emotion…From the earliest days of the church, Christians have based their closeness to God on theology - on what they knew about God from Scripture - rather than feelings.  Many of the first Christians shed blood for believing in God.  If anyone had the right to feel distant from God, wouldn’t it be the people suffering for his sake? Instead, the early disciples rejoiced at the chance to suffer for Christ (Acts 5:41)."

From the book: Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity

by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff Arnold

Quote of the Day

Modern liberal critics leave behind them a world of jumbled confusion.  They tell us that God has revealed Himself but refuse to pin themselves down as to exactly what that revelation is.  In fact, upon occasion, we find them glorifying the uncertainty of their preaching, because this offers them an opportunity for the exercise of 'the leap of faith.'  The basic thesis of their dialectical theology is that the acts of God in history cannot be detected apart from 'a leap of faith' and the revealed Words of God can never be identified with any words.  The avow that divine acts are beyond history and divine words are beyond language.  There is a segment of neoorthodoxy that distinguishes between God's Word and the human expression of that word.  The so-called word of God can be recognized only in the area of experience.  This would mean that not even the words of Jesus are a valid external authority.  Only those words of Jesus are valid which one feels to be appropriate to Jesus according to the judgment of one' sown mind, which seems to mean that one's own mind becomes one's own Jesus…….Thus, the entire Bible becomes a Book from which one may pick and choose what appeals to one's mind.  Experience becomes the supreme authority.  Bible teaching becomes secondary….Religious experience thus becomes an object of one's own interpretation fo truth and as such  it can prove anything….Cutting theology off from the control of the biblical text cannot do aught but lead to its death.

 

 

- W. A. Criswell

Quote of the Day

No artistic depiction should ever be offered as a way to understand something of God's glory.  Any attempt to understand an aspect of God's glory in this way would present a false impression and a distortion.  "In a similar way, the pathos of the crucifix obscures the glory of Christ, for it hides the fact of His deity, His victory on the cross, and His present kingdom."

- From Mark Rooker's book  The Ten Commandments:  Ethics for the Twenty-First Century

Quote of the Day

You remember the apostle Peter's famous remark with regard to the writings of the apostle Paul. He says that there are things in them which are `hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest . . . unto their own destruction'. What he means is this. They read these Epistles of Paul, yes; but they are twisting them, they are wresting them to their own destruction. You can easily read these Epistles and be no wiser at the end than you were at the beginning because of what you have been reading into what Paul says, wresting them to your own destruction. Now that is something which we must always bear in mind with regard to the whole of the Bible. I can be seated with the Bible in front of me; I can be reading its words and going through its chapters; and yet I may be drawing a conclusion which is quite false to the pages in front of me.
There can be no doubt at all that the commonest cause of all this is our tendency so often to approach the Bible with a theory. We go to our Bibles with this theory, and everything we read is controlled by it. Now we are all quite familiar with that. There is a sense in which it is true to say that you can prove anything you like from the Bible. That is how heresies have arisen. The heretics were never dishonest men; they were mistaken men. They should not be thought of as men who were deliberately setting out to go wrong and to teach something that is wrong; they have been some of the most sincere men that the Church has ever known. What was the matter with them? Their trouble was this: they evolved a theory and they were rather pleased with it; then they went back with this theory to the Bible, and they seemed to find it everywhere. If you read half a verse and emphasize over-much some other half verse elsewhere, your theory is soon proved. Now obviously this is something of which we have to be very wary. There is nothing so dangerous as to come to the Bible with a theory, with preconceived ideas, with some pet idea of our own, because the moment we do so, we shall be tempted to overemphasize one aspect and under-emphasize another.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Quote of the Day

If we think that our substitutes do more good or reap larger results than the gospel way, we will create serious difficulties and engender a destructive enmity within the church.  "I have known brethren tell sinners a great many falsehoods with the view of saving them."  He did not want one creed for the ministers' meeting and another for the enquiry room.  Salvation is not promoted by the suppression of truth…."I hold that I have no right to state false doctrines, even if I knew it would save a soul.  The supposition is, of course, absurd; but it makes you see what I mean."

…Our tampering produces false theology, false ideas of Christianity, tolerates disobedience to the ordinances, and makes supposed believers impatient with calls to holiness.  One may sure, however, that Christ will not be trifled with, will not have "his words shuffled like a deck of cards," will be "Lord as well as Savior" or will not be Savior.  A supposed assurance of forensic justification "apart from a spiritual work within the soul - - a change of heart, and a renewal of mind" does not yield a future of heaven.

From - Living by Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon by Thomas Nettles

Quote of the Day

Spurgeon advocated a pure Biblicism for theological construction.  He loved the historic confessions and the pious and helpful writings of the Reformers and Puritans as well as selected numbers from the early Fathers and even some medieval writers…but all of these edified only to the degree that they opened to the mind that which already abided in scriptural revelation.  Theology is not new, nor has it been the product of tradition or development…"the epistles are older than the thirty-nine articles."…We may gain assistance through others that interpret Scripture doctrines, but no addition to the doctrines themselves… Christian doctrine, to the degree that God wants us to know, has mature development in Scripture.  Neither individual theologian nor church corporate may add to, diminish, amend, or dilute by false synthesis any assertion of the biblical text.  We may find a way to give clear teaching on a variety of subjects and seek to show their mature biblical development and relations, and we may surely benefit from the way Christians through the ages have formulated these biblical truths and their practical applications; any effort, however to go beyond the biblical text and its own internal development perverts the truth.

 

From:  Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon - By Thomas

Quote of the Day

If you were to get up and hum a tune then you wouldn’t get anything if you had no theology. Now I can just hear a message in song, if I know the song and I know the words of it; I can get a blessing from it. But I’m not getting it from the music; I’m getting it primarily from the word that the music is seeking to proclaim. Now if music was intended to be put on the plane of the word of God, then the Lord Jesus would have come from heaven and whistled and hummed. 

S. Lewis Johnson

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…Calvinists define all doctrine in a God-centered way.  Sin  is horrible because it is an affront to God.  Salvation is wonderful because it brings glory to God.  Heaven is glorious because it is the place where God is all in all.  Hell is infernal because it is the place where God  manifests His righteous wrath.  God is central in all of those truths.

Joel Beeke

Quote of the Day

Mingled vanity and pride appear… when miserable men do seek after God, instead of ascending higher than themselves, as they ought to do, they measure him by their own carnal stupidity, and, neglecting solid inquiry, fly off to indulge their curiosity in vain speculation.  Hence they do not conceive of him in the character in which He is manifested….it is not Him they worship, but, instead of Him, the dream and figment of their own heart.  This corrupt procedure is admirably described by Paul, when he says that 'thinking to be wise, they became fools' (Rom.i.22)

 

John Calvin

Quote of the Day

In space, astronauts experience the misery of having no reference point, no force that draws them to the center. Where there is no "moral gravity"- that is, no force that draws us to the center- there is spiritual weightlessness. We float on feelings that will carry us where we were never meant to go; we bubble with emotional experiences that we often take for spiritual ones; and we are puffed up with pride. Instead of seriousness, there is foolishness. Instead of gravity, flippancy. Sentimentality takes the place of theology. Our reference point will never serve to keep our feet on solid rock. Our reference point, until we answer God's call, is merely ourselves. We cannot possibly tell which end is up.

Elisabeth Elliot

Quote of the Day

Part of one of Martin Luther's letters to Philip Melanchthon from June 27, 1530(Melanchthon was at the Diet of Augsburg):

Grace and peace in Christ — in Christ, I say, not in the world. Amen. I shall write again, dear Philip, about the apology you make for your silence. This courier has come unexpectedly and suddenly from Wittenberg and is going to leave at once for Nuremberg, so I must wait to write more fully for another post.

Those great cares by which you say you are consumed I vehemently hate ; they rule your heart not on account of the greatness of the cause but by reason of the greatness of your unbelief. John Huss and

many others have waged harder battles than we do. If our cause is great, its author and champion is great also, for it is not ours. Why are you therefore always tormenting yourself ? If our cause is false, let us recant ; if it is true, why should we make him a liar who commands us to be of untroubled heart ? Cast your burden on the Lord, he says. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him with a broken heart. Does he speak in vain or to beasts ? I, too, am quite often smitten, but not all the time. It is not your theology which makes you anxious, but your philosophy, the same which has been gnawing at your friend Camerarius. What good can you do by your vain anxiety ? What can the devil do more than slay us ? What after that ? I beg you, so pugnacious in all else, fight against yourself, your own worst enemy, who furnish Satan with arms against yourself. Christ died once for sinners, and will not die again for truth and justice, but will live and reign. If he be true, what fear is there for the truth ? .... I pray for you earnestly and am deeply pained that you keep sucking up cares like a leech and thus rendering my prayers vain. Christ knows whether it is stupidity or bravery, but I am not much disturbed, rather of better courage than I had hoped. God who is able to raise the dead is also able to uphold a falling cause, or to raise a fallen one and make it strong. If we are not worthy instruments to accomplish his purpose, he will find others. If we are not strengthened by his promises, to whom else in all the world can they pertain ? But saying more would be pouring water into the sea.

I forwarded your letters to Wittenberg, both that written before and that written after the arrival of the Emperor. For at home they are also troubled at your silence, as you will learn from Bugenhagen's letter, though the fault of their not hearing from you is not, as Jonas says, the messenger's, but yours, and yours alone. May Christ comfort, strengthen, and teach you by his spirit. Amen. If I hear that things are going badly or that the cause is in danger, I shall hardly be able to restrain myself from flying to Augsburg, to see what the Bible calls the terrible teeth of Satan roundabout. I shall write again soon ; in the mean time give my greetings to all my friends.

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

Where there is no “moral gravity” – that is, no force that draws us to the center – there is spiritual weightlessness. We float on feelings that will carry us where we never meant to go; we bubble with emotional experiences that we often take for spiritual ones; and we are puffed up with pride. Instead of seriousness, there is foolishness. Instead of gravity, flippancy. Sentimentality takes the place of theology. Our reference point will never serve to keep our feet on solid rock, for our reference point, until we answer God’s call, is merely ourselves. We cannot possibly tell which end is up. Paul calls them fools who “…measure themselves by themselves, to find in themselves their own standard of comparison!”

Elisabeth Elliot

Quote Of The Day

Whence could such a creature(man) come but from Thee O Lord? Or shall any man be skillful enough to fashion himself? Or is their any other vein by which being and life runs into us save this, that "Thou, O Lord hast made us," with whom being and life are one, because Thou Thyself art being and life in the highest? Thou art the highest, "Thou changest not," neither in Thee doth this present day come to an end, though it doth end in Thee, since in Thee all such things are; for they would have no way unless Thou sustainest them. And since "Thy years shall have no end," Thy years are an ever present day. And how many of ours and fathers' days have passed through this Thy day, and received from it their measure and fashion of being; and others yet to come shall so receive and pass away! "But Thou art the same," and all the things of tomorrow and the days yet to come, and all of yesterday, and the days that are past, Thou wilt do today, Thou hast done today.

What is it to me if any understandeth not? Let him still rejoice and say "What is this?" Let him rejoice even so, and rather love to discover in failing to discover, than in discovering not to discover Thee.

Augustine