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

...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

Quote of the Day

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)