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

…To change such perfect good news as the gospel set forth made no sense and reached the depths of Spurgeon's disgust.  "My blood boils with indignation at the idea of improving the gospel.  There is but one Savior, and that one Savior is the same for ever.  His doctrine is the same in every age, and is not yea and nay."  If modern proposal for theological change were authentic, what an absurd scene would eternity hold forth.  "What a strange result we should obtain in the general assembly of heaven,"  Spurgeon envisioned, "if some were saved by the gospel of the first century, and others by the gospel fo the second, and others by the gospel of the seventeenth, and others by the gospel of the nineteenth century!  Imagine the scene.  "We should need a different song of praise for the clients of these various periods, and the mingled chorus would be rather to the glory of man's culture than to the praise of the one Lord.  No such mottled heaven, and no such discordant song, shall ever be produced." 

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

Quote of the Day

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

Quote of the Day

We are not simply a society in which we recognize the existence of, and the differences between, a variety of religious beliefs, but one in which we declare all such beliefs are to be equally valid. From that perspective there is only one kind of heresy, namely, to claim that one view is ultimately right, where others are wrong. In granting plausibility to everything, we may grant certainty to nothing. Tolerance has been embraced at the expense of truth… To allow that everyone and everything is right is to destroy the notion of truth itself.

Alistair Begg

Quote of the Day

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

Quote of the Day

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

Quote of the Day

Then what is a pure heart? In what does it consist? The answer can be given quickly, and you do not have to climb up to heaven or run to a monastery for it and establish it with your own ideas. You should be on your guard against any ideas that you call your own, as if they were just so much mud and filth. And you should realize that when a monk in the monastery is sitting in deepest contemplation, excluding the world from his heart altogether, and thinking about the Lord God the way he himself paints and imagines Him, he is actually sitting—if you will pardon the expression—in the dung, not up to his knees but up to his ears. For he is proceeding on his own ideas without the Word of God; and that is sheer deception and delusion, as Scripture testifies everywhere.

What is meant by a “pure heart” is this: one that is watching and pondering what God says and replacing its own ideas with the Word of God. This alone is pure before God, yes, purity itself, which purifies everything that it includes and touches. Therefore, though a common laborer, a shoemaker, or a blacksmith may be dirty and sooty or may smell because he is covered with dirt and pitch, still he may sit at home and think: “My God has made me a man. He has given me my house, wife, and child and has commanded me to love them and to support them with my work.” Note that he is pondering the Word of God in his heart; and though he stinks outwardly, inwardly he is pure incense before God. But if he attains the highest purity so that he also takes hold of the Gospel and believes in Christ—without this, that purity is impossible—then he is pure completely, inwardly in his heart toward God and outwardly toward everything under him on earth.

Martin Luther

Quote of the Day

Lately I've had the occasion to fly a lot around the country, preaching here and there. Even though I'm here on Sundays, it seems like my weeks have been spent in airports, sometimes for a long time, as I've had mechanical delays and things like that. And I've become very much aware of a book that I knew was out there but I see literally all over all the airports that I've been in, in the last month or so, it has been labeled, at least, the best selling religious book of the time. The title of it is Your Best Life Now. I have seen stacks and stacks and stacks of those books everywhere I've gone.

Out of curiosity, I want to know what's in the book and so I found this on page 5, “God wants this to be the best time of your life.” On another page it says, “Happy, successful, fulfilled individuals have learned how to live their best life now. On another page it says, “As you put the principles found in these pages to work today, you will begin living your best life now.” And that is absolutely true if you're not a Christian. This is it, you better get the book because your next life is going to be infinitely worse than this one.

This is your best life now. In fact, it's your only life because in the world to come, you will only exist in a perpetual state of dying with no hope, no satisfaction, no meaning, no joy and no future and no relief from eternal suffering. That's the worst life possible. And this is your best life, if your next life is in hell.

But, on the other hand, if you are a child of God and your sins are forgiven and you've come to embrace Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, this is not even close to your best life.......

Contrary to what is popular today, even in religious circles, even in quote/unquote religion circles, even in the name of Jesus, the Lord is not promising you here and now a full, happy, rich, satisfying, trouble-free life of health, wealth and success. Oh He does promise that. Absolutely...a full, rich, satisfying, trouble-free life of health and wealth and success and absolute joy and peace and perfection...but not now...not now. In fact, quite on the other hand, our Lord has promised to those who know Him and love Him in this life...trouble, persecution, rejection, difficulty, trials, temptation, pain, suffering, sorrow, sickness and even physical death.

So, for Christians, this is our worst life now. It isn't that it's bad, but comparatively it's the worst when you think about the life to come, which is the best. Your best life as a Christian begins when this life ends.

- John Macarthur

Quote of the Day

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

Quote of the Day

Discernment is not simply a matter of telling the difference between what is right and wrong; rather it is the difference between right and almost right.

  

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

Truth is mightier than eloquence.  The victory remains with him who lisps out the truth, and not with him who puts forth a lie in flowing language.

 

Martin Luther

Quote of the Day

Beware of a religion without holdfasts….

Everybody is getting to be so oily, so plastic, so untrue, that we need a race of hardshells to teach us how to believe. Those old-fashioned people who in former ages believed something and thought the opposite of it to be false, were truer folk, than the present timeservers.

I should like to ask the divines of the broad school whether any doctrine is worth a man’s dying for it. They would have to reply, “Well, of course, if a man had to go to the stake or change his opinions, the proper way would be to state them with much diffidence, and to be extremely respectful to the opposite school.”

But suppose he is required to deny the truth?

“Well, there is much to be said on each side, and probably the negative may have a measure of truth in it as well as the positive. At any rate, it cannot be a prudent thing to incur the odium of being burned, and so it might be preferable to leave the matter an open question for the time being.”

Yes, and as these gentlemen always find it unpleasant to be unpopular, they soften down the hard threatenings of Scripture as to the world to come, and put a color upon every doctrine to which worldly-wise men object.<big>The teachers of doubt are very doubtful teachers.

 

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

…when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the' German Christians'(Nazi church ) in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't.  "If you board the wrong train," he said, "it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction."

From  Eric Metaxas book, BONHOEFFER

Quote of the Day

 As Christianity spread, and the Church became more secularized, this realization of the costliness of grace gradually faded.  The world was Christianized, and grace became its common property…..The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world.  Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship…….It is under the influence of this kind of 'grace' that the world has been made 'Christian,' but at the cost of secularizing the Christian religion as never before…The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different form the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace.   The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven.  I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.  Grace as the data for our calculations means grace at the cheapest price, but grace as the answer to the sum means costly grace.  It is terrifying to realize what use can be made of a genuine evangelical doctrine.  In both cases we have the identical formula - 'justification by faith alone.' Yet the misuse of the formula leads to the complete destruction of its very essence.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote of the Day

Some want to shape the Scriptures to their creed, and they get a very nice square

creed too, and trim the Bible most dexterously: it is wonderful how they do it, but I

would rather have a crooked creed and a straight Bible, than I would try to twist the

Bible round to suit what I believe. 

Charles Spurgeon