Quote of the Day

…Spurgeon observed many, 'who, by hearing continually the most precious doctrine that belief in Jesus Christ is saving, have forgotten other truths, and have concluded that they were saved when they were not, have fancied they believed when as yet they were total strangers to the experience which was not grounded upon the divine word rightly understood, 'nor proved by any facts in their own souls.'  They resented any suggestion of self examination by gospel tests as 'an assault upon their assurance' and 'defended their false peace by the notion that to raise a question about their certain salvation would be unbelief.' Their ill-placed certainty has put them in a hopeless condition and they ignore biblical warnings and admonitions by 'their fatal persuasion that it is needless to attend to them.'  Their historical knowledge of the work of Christ has settled them in a conviction 'that godly fear and careful walking are superfluities, if not actually an offense against the gospel.' 


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

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At what point does our cultural engagement become just a sophisticated way of being worldly?

Trevin Wax

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We find thus by experience that there is no good applying to heaven for earthly comfort.  Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no other kind.  Earth cannot give earthly comfort either, as there is no earthly comfort in the long run.

C. S. Lewis

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What are you out for?  Believe me, you will get it whatever it is, if you are determined to do so.  Are you out for the rewards of this world?  They can be obtained with very little effort.  They satisfy for a while, but when one begins to think seriously about them they are not even worth that little effort.  But still we go on trying to get the best our of both worlds.  Let us realize once and for all that the things of the Spirit can only be appreciated by the spirit.  The reward for a spiritual way of life is a spiritual reward.  Why do we expect to get the rewards of this world as well?  Why do we so often complain that the ungodly seem to succeed while we fail?  We are not out for the same thing.  We must learn to judge spiritual results by spiritual  standards.  Whatever a man soweth that also shall he reap.  If we have sown to the spirit why expect to get a worldly and bodily harvest?  The man who sows for worldly results gets them, and everyone can see these and know them and appreciate them.  The Christian, on the other hand, has very little that the world can appreciate.  That is why the Way of Life is a difficult way - it is a life of faith.  When you enter upon it, you give up everything that the world treasures most, and it is inevitable that at times we shall experience a sense of loss.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

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Too many modern preachers are so bent on understanding the culture that they develop the mind of the culture and not the mind of Christ. They start to think like the world, and not like the Savior. Frankly, the nuances of worldly culture are virtually irrelevant to me. I want to know the mind of Christ and bring that to bear on the culture, no matter what culture I may be ministering to. If I’m going to stand up in a pulpit and be a representative of Jesus Christ, I want to know how He thinks—and that must be my message to His people too. The only way to know and proclaim the mind of Christ is by being faithful to study and preach His Word. What happens to preachers who obsess about cultural “relevancy” is that they become worldly, not godly.

John MacArthur

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Otherworldliness is escapism only if there is no other world.  If there is, it is worldliness that is escapism.

Peter Kreeft

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We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don't wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.

 

Amy Carmichael

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The will of God is not something you add to your life. It’s a course you choose. You either line yourself up with the Son of God…or you capitulate to the principle which governs the rest of the world. 

 

Elisabeth Elliot

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A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

 

G. K. Chesterton

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It is obvious that Agnosticism is the destruction of science. All the investigations and reasonings of science proceed on the foundation of axioms, - call them intuitions, rational postulates, or by any other name. But these, according to Agnostics, denote simply a certain stage at which the process of evolution has arrived. What is to hinder them from vanishing, or resolving themselves into another set of axioms, with the forward movement of this unresting process? What then will become of the doctrine of Agnosticism itself? It is plain that on this philosophy, all knowledge of realities, as distinct from transitory impressions, is a house built on the sand. All science is reduced to schein – mere semblance. It is impossible for the Agnostic to limit his knowledge to experience, and to reject as unverified the implications of experience, without abandoning nearly all that he holds true. If he sticks to his principle, his creed will be a short one. Consciousness is confined to the present moment. I am conscious of remembering an experience in the past. This consciousness as a present fact I cannot deny without a contradiction. But how do I know that the object of the recollection – be it a thought, or feeling or experience of any sort – ever had a reality? How do I know anything past, or that there is a past? Now, memory is necessary to the comparison of sensations, to reasoning, to our whole mental life. Yet to believe memory is to transcend experience. I have certain sensations which I attribute collectively to a cause named my “body.” Like sensations lead me to recognize the existence of other bodies like my own. But how do I know that there is consciousness within these bodies? How do I know that my fellow-men whom I see about me have minds like my own? The senses cannot perceive the intelligence of the friends about me. I infer that they are intelligent, but in this inference I transcend experience. Experience reduced to its exact terms, according to the methods of Agnosticism, is confined to the present feeling, - the feeling of the transient moment. When the Agnostic goes beyond this, when he infers that what is remembered was once presented in consciousness, that his fellow-men are thinking beings, and not mindless puppets, that any intelligent beings exist outside of himself, he transcends experience. If he were to predicate intelligence of God, he would be guilty of no graver assumption than when he ascribes intelligence to the fellow-men he sees moving about, and with whom he is conversing.

George Parker

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I'm still thinking about the assertion…that man cannot live without hope, and that men who have really lost all hope often become wild and wicked.  It may be an open question whether in this case hope = illusion.  The importance of illusion to one's life should certainly not be underestimated;  but for a Christian there must be hope based on a firm foundation.  And if even illusion has so much power in people's lives that it can keep life moving, how great a power there is in a hope that is based on certainty, and how invincible a life with such a hope is. 'Christ our hope' - this Pauline formula is the strength of our lives.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Evangelism and theology for the most part go separate ways, and the result is great loss for both. When theology is not held on course by the demands of evangelistic communication, it grows abstract and speculative, wayward in method, theoretical in interest and irresponsible in stance. When evangelism is not fertilized, fed and controlled by theology, it becomes a stylized performance seeking its effect through manipulative skills rather than the power of vision and the force of truth. Both theology and evangelism are then, in one important sense, unreal, false to their own God-given nature; for all true theology has an evangelistic thrust, and all true evangelism is theology in action.           

J. I. Packer

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I have no sympathy with the preaching which degrades the Truth of God into a hobbyhorse for its own thought and only looks upon Scripture as a kind of pulpit from which it may thunder out its own opinions! No, if I have gone beyond what that Book has taught, may God blot out everything that I have said! I beseech you, never believe me if I go an atom beyond what is plainly taught there. I am content to live and to die as the mere repeater of Scriptural teaching—as a person who has thought out nothing and invented nothing—as one who never thought invention to be any part of his calling, but who concluded that he was to take the message from the lips of God to the best of his ability and simply to be a mouth for God to the people—mourning much that anything of his own should come between—but never thinking that he was somehow to refine the message or to adapt it to the brilliance of this wonderful century and then to hand it out as being so much his own that he might take some share of the glory of it.

 

Charles Spurgeon

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See how precious material runs to waste if the light is not trimmed! There is a thief in the candle, and so it takes  to guttering and running away, instead of fielding up its substance to be used for the light.

It is sad when a Christian man has some ill habit, or sinister aim. We have seen fine lives wasted through a love of wine. It never came to actual drunkenness, but it lowered the man and spoiled his influence. So is it with a hasty temper, or a proud manner, or a tendency to find fault. How many would be grandly useful but for some wretched impediment!

Worldliness runs away with many a man's energies; love of amusement makes great gutters in his time; or fondness for feasts and gilded society robs him of his space for service. With some, political heat runs away with the zeal which should have been spent upon religion, and in other cases sheer folly and extravagance cause a terrible waste of energy which belonged to the Lord.

You see there is fire, and there is light; but something extraneous and mischievous is at work, and it needs to be removed. If this is your case, you may well desire the Lord to snuff you, however painful the operation may be. Depend upon it, we have no life-force to spare, and everything which lessens our consecrated energy is a robbery of God.

Charles Spurgeon

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…the more Jesus preached to the same crowds again and again, the more His messages were filled with rebukes and urgent pleas for their repentance.  He was not impressed with the size or enthusiasm of large crowds.  He was not interested in accumulating the kind of disciples whose main concern was for  what they might get out of the relationship.  He never upholstered his message to make it more cushy for popular opinion, and he never turned down  the rhetorical heat in order to keep the congregation as comfortable as possible.  If anything, His approach was the exact opposite.  He seemed to do everything He could to disquiet the merely curious who were unconverted.  They absolutely loved it when He did miracles.  He rebuked them for that, and He made sure they could not ignore his message." 

 - John Macarthur

Quote of the Day

The nature of Christ’s salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day evangelist.  He announces a Savior from hell rather than a Savior from sin.  And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness.

- A. W. Pink

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Sadly and ironically, in its attempt to achieve cultural relevance, mainstream evangelicalism has become essentially irrelevant.  As Os Guinness points out, the seductive promise of 'relevance' is, in reality, the road to irrelevance.  When the church markets itself like the world, it loses the distinctiveness of its message and irretrievably compromises the gospel.  The entertainment value may be high, attracting throngs each week; but the eternal value is conspicuously absent, as those same people go home unchallenged and unchanged.

-John Macarthur- 

Quote of the Day

Any amount of nonsense has been talked about the need of novelty, and in that sense there is nothing particularly meritorious about being modern. A man who seriously describes his creed as Modernism might just as well invent a creed called Mondayism, meaning that he puts special faith in the fancies that occurred to him on Monday; or a creed called Morningism, meaning that he believed in the thoughts that occurred to him in the morning but not in the afternoon.

Modernity is only the moment of time in which we happen to find ourselves, and nobody who thinks will suppose that it is bound to be superior, either to the time that comes after it or to the time that went before. But in a relative and rational sense we may congratulate ourselves on knowing the news of the moment, and having realized recent facts or discoveries that some people still ignore.

- G. K. Chesterton

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It is not… by an earthly leader, by a worldly hierarchy, by an uniformity of worship, of liturgy, by crosses, miters, censers, it is not by all these things that the unity of the Church is manifested; she leaves to the world these miserable elements. The true Church of Christ has no other bond than the unity of her faith and confession, in love and holiness of life. With her, all externals, which men regard of so high importance, are altogether secondary. All is free for her, saving her Jesus. When Rome points to her false and dead unity, the Church of Christ is to present a true and living unity; a UNITY and not an UNIFORMITY. 

 

Jean Henri Merle D'aubigne

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Our Savior did not use any means which might enlist man's lower nature on his side. When I have heard of large congregations gathered together by the music of a fine choir, I have remembered that the same thing is done at the opera house and the music-hall, and I have felt no joy. When we have heard of crowds enchanted by the sublime music of the pealing organ, I have seen in the fact rather a glorification of St. Cecilia than of Jesus Christ. Our Lord trusted in no measure or degree to the charms of music for the establishing his throne. He has not given to his disciples the slightest intimation that they are to employ the attractions of the concert room to promote the kingdom of heaven.

I find no rubric in Scripture commanding Paul to clothe himself in robes of blue, scarlet, or violet; neither do I find Peter commanded to wear a surplice, an alb, or a chasuble. The Holy Spirit has not cared even to hint at a surpliced choir, or at banners, processions, and processional hymns. Now, if our Lord had arranged a religion of fine shows, and pompous ceremonies, and gorgeous architecture, and enchanting, music, and bewitching incense, and the like, we could have comprehended its growth; but he is "a root out of a dry ground", for he owes nothing to any of these.

Christianity has been infinitely hindered by the musical, the aesthetic, and the ceremonial devices of men, but it has never been advantaged by them, no, not a jot. The sensuous delights of sound and sight have always been enlisted on the side of error, but Christ has employed nobler and more spiritual agencies. Things which fascinate the senses are left to be the chosen instruments of Antichrist, but the gospel, disdaining Saul's armor, goes forth in the natural simplicity of its own might, like David, with sling and stone. Our holy religion owes nothing whatever to any carnal means; so far as they are concerned, it is "a root out of a dry ground".

Charles Spurgeon