Where God is at the center of things, worship inevitably follows. Where there is no spirit of worship, there God has been dethroned and displaced.
The problem is not in the clarity of the revelation. The problem is in the darkness of the human mind.
God does something to us as well as for us through the cross. He persuades us that He loves us.
Jesus undid everything that Adam did, and did everything Adam failed to do.
Humility is not simply feeling small and useless - like an inferiority complex. It is sensing how great and glorious God is, and seeing myself in that light.
When you look at the Cross, what do you see? You see God’s awesome faithfulness. Nothing – not even the instinct to spare His own Son – will turn him back from keeping His word.
When the New Testament speaks about the fullness of grace which we find in Christ, it does not mean only forgiveness, pardon and justification. Christ has done much more for us. He died for us, but he also lived for us. Now he has sent his own Spirit to us so that we might draw on his strength. He grew in grace, and when we draw on his power we shall likewise grow in grace.
Evil deeds are the fruit of an evil heart. They are not an aberration from our true self but a revelation of it.
The conviction that Christian doctrine matters for Christian living is one of the most important growth points of the Christian life.
The Father did not require the death of Christ to persuade Him to love us. Christ died because the Father loves us.
You must know, rest in, think through, and act upon your new identity - you are in Christ
We [should not] make the mistake of thinking that marriage will provide the ultimate satisfaction for which we all hunger. To assume so would be to be guilty of blasphemy. Only God satisfies the hungry heart. Marriage is but one of the channels He uses to enable us to taste how deeply satisfying His thirst-quenching grace can be.
Christian contentment, therefore, is the direct fruit of having no higher ambition than to belong to the Lord and to be totally at His disposal in the place He appoints, at the time He chooses, with the provision He is pleased to make.
Christianity is Christ because there isn't anything else. There is no atonement that somehow can be detached from who the Lord Jesus is. There is no grace that can be attached to you transferred from Him. All there is, is Christ and your soul.
Most Christians have more Bibles than they know what to do with, but have little understanding of what is in them.
Probably no theologian in English language has ever rivaled Owen stressing the absolute centrality of Christ's penal substitution and therefore his as Priest. . . . For that reason alone The Priesthood of Christ is worth all the time it takes to read it with humility, care, and reflection.
The weakest faith gets the same strong Christ as does the strongest faith.
No short-cut that tries to bypass the patient unfolding of the true character of God, and our relationship to him as his children, can ever succeed in providing long-term spiritual therapy.
Our first priority in ministry must be love. Love for His Word, love for His people, and love for His appearing.
The jewels of spiritual service are always quarried in the depths of spiritual experience. Never is this more true than in revival. Bend the church and save the people.
Don't tell me that you have a Reformed Church in the tradition of Calvin until you have the preaching of the Word every day of the week, devote Wednesday's to prayer and have the church gather together for prayer.
Man's insulting God is not reversed by our insulting man.
Every day we need our gaze redirected from ourselves to God.
If you desire anything less for yourself than absolute obedience to God, a life of total devotion to the Lord, a life of absolute sin-less-ness - if you desire anything less, you are fighting against God's desire for you.
We discover the will of God by a sensitive application of Scripture to our own lives.
Failure to deal with the presence of sin can often be traced back to spiritual amnesia – forgetting our new, true, real identity. As a believer, I am someone who has been delivered from the dominion of sin and who therefore is free and motivated to fight against the remnants of sin in my heart. You must know, rest in, think through, and act upon your new identity – you are in Christ
The real test that I believe that God is love is that tragedies don't separate me from the conviction that God is love.
Be obedient even when you do not know where obedience may lead you
Appearances can be deceptive. The fact that we cannot see what God is doing does not mean that He is doing nothing. The Lord has His own timetable. It is we who must learn to adjust to it, not vice versa. When God's time comes nothing will stand in His way. We can therefore wait for Him with this happy confidence: "As for God, His way is perfect" (2 Samuel 22:31).
Thinking that I deserve heaven is a sure sign I have no understanding of the gospel.
It is God who gives us the spirit of worship (Psalm 133:3), and it is what we know of God that produces this spirit of worship. We might say that worship is simply theology, doctrine, what we think about God, going into top gear! Instead of merely thinking about Him, we tell Him, in prayer and praise and song, how great and glorious we believe Him to be!
It's the centrality of the Word and not the person who preaches it that's important.
The only thing of my very own which I contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.
Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!
The fear of the Lord tends to take away all other fears... This is the secret of Christian courage and boldness.
Spiritual growth depends on two things: first a willingness to live according to the Word of God; second, a willingness to take whatever consequences emerge as a result.
True faith takes its character and quality from its object. Its strength therefore depends on the character of Christ. Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!
The determining factor of my existence is no longer my past.
Marriage, and the process of coming to it, is not heaven! It is the bonding together of two needy sinners in order to make a partnership which is substantially greater than either of them alone.
Thankfulness grows best in the seed-bed of conviction, just as some plants must be placed in the soil in the winter if they are to flower in the summer.
God's promises are not fortune cookies. We do not use them in order to get a spiritual "fix" for the day.
Jesus has a special, compassionate concern for those who are broken and needy.
If you are justified, you can no more be unjustified than Christ can be pulled down from heaven.
Until we acknowledge our sin and guilt, we will never come to discover that it can be forgiven.
This, then, is the foundation of sanctification in Reformed theology. It is rooted, not in humanity and their achievement of holiness or sanctification, but in what God has done in Christ, and for us in union with him. Rather than view Christians first and foremost in the microcosmic context of their own progress, the Reformed doctrine first of all sets them in the macrocosm of God's activity in redemptive history. It is seeing oneself in this context that enables the individual Christian to grow in true holiness.
Repentance is a characteristic of the whole life, not the action of a single moment.
There are actually only ever two pastoral problems you will ever encounter. The first is this: persuading those who are under the dominion of sin that they are under the dominion of sin. That's the task of evangelism. And [second], persuading those who are no longer under the dominion of sin that they are no longer under the dominion of sin because they're Christ's.
The notion that we are children of God, his own sons and daughters, lies at the heart of all Christian theology, and is the mainspring of all Christian living.
Without the spirit of the Lord Jesus, we will look upon 'the least of these' simply as the least.
The foundation of worship in the heart is not emotional ("I feel full of worship" or "The atmosphere is so worshipful"). Actually, it is theological. Worship is not something we "work up," it is something that "comes down" to us, from the character of God.
Do I learn through dark providences, or simply seem relieved when they are over?
The holiness of God teaches us that there is only one way to deal with sin- radically, seriously, painfully, constantly. If you do not so live, you do not live in the presence of the Holy One of Israel.
True discernment means not only distinguishing the right from the wrong; it means distinguishing the primary from the secondary, the essential from the indifferent, and the permanent from the transient. And, yes, it means distinguishing between the good and the better, and even between the better and the best.
It is only when we want to take our lives out of the Father’s hands and have them under our own control that we find ourselves gripped with anxiety. The secret of freedom from anxiety is freedom from ourselves and abandonment of our own plans. But that spirit emerges in our lives only when our minds are filled with the knowledge that our Father can be trusted implicitly to supply everything we need.
Those who are most conscious of forgiveness are invariably those who have been most acutely convicted of their sin.
Twentieth-century man needs to be reminded at times that work is not the result of the Fall. Man was made to work, because the God who made him was a 'working God.' Man was made to be creative, with his mind and his hands. Work is part of the dignity of his existence.
When man became the measure of all things what was lost was man.
When I look at the cross, I learn to say: 'The Son of God loved me, and gave Himself for me' (Galatians 2:20). I begin to believe with Paul that if God did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up to the cross for me, then He loves me so much He will always give me only what will bring me blessing (Romans 8:32).
There is a difference between going to a service "for the worship" and going to a service "to worship the Lord." The distinction appears to be a minor one, but it may imply the difference between the worship of God and the worship of music!
Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.
The foundation of worship in the heart is not emotional...it is theological.
How do we bring glory to God? The Bible’s short answer is: by growing more and more like Jesus Christ.
We are far too good at analyzing what is wrong with the culture and far too myopic at analyzing what is wrong in the church.
We best defend the Lord's glory by speaking first TO Him about unbelieving men rather than speaking first ABOUT Him to unbelieving men.
The goal of theology is the worship of God. The posture of theology is on one's knees. The mode of theology is repentance.
We can never reflect too much on God's grace.
God has chosen us. Our status is not a matter of our worthiness, but of His love.
For worship is, essentially, the reverse of sin. Sin began (and begins) when we succumb to the temptation, "You shall be as gods." We make ourselves the center of the universe and dethrone God. By contrast, worship is giving God his true worth; it is acknowledging Him to be the Lord of all things, and the Lord of everything in our lives. He is, indeed, the Most High God!
When I know that Christ is the one real sacrifice for my sins, that His work on my behalf has been accepted by God, that He is my heavenly Intercessor - then His blood is the antidote to the poison in the voices that echo in my conscience, condemning me for my many failures. Indeed, Christ's shed blood chokes them into silence!
I began to read for myself and realised that here was somebody who could teach me profound biblical theology, get inside my heart with his spiritual analysis, and help me to become a minister of the gospel, which is what I wanted to be.
I've often reflected on the rather obvious thought that when his disciples were about to have the world collapse in on them, our Lord spent so much time in the Upper Room speaking to them about the mystery of the Trinity. If anything could underline the necessity of Trinitarianism for practical Christianity, that must surely be it!
God made everything else but man "after its kind"' - that is, according to the purpose and destiny he envisaged for it. But he made man in His own image. Man is patterned on God! He was made to represent God - in created, human form.
There is nothing more important to learn about Christian growth than this: Growing in grace means becoming like Christ.
God's guidance will require patience on our part. His leading is not usually a direct assurance, a revelation, but His sovereign controlling of the circumstances of our lives, with the Word of God as our rule. It is therefore, inevitable that the unfolding of His purposes will take time - sometimes a very long time.
No one can will the will to will what it will not will!
You do not become a master musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true of the life of prayer.
The foundation of our love for the Lord lies in the recognition of His holiness, our sinfulness, and His grace.
The true church is too different for the world to tolerate it.
Inerrancy matters because it honors the Spirit, who wants to honor the Son, who wants to honor the Father.
Secular humanism debases the human.
Contentment is an undervalued grace.
Worship is not something we "work up," it is something that "comes down" to us, from the character of God.
Where God is at the center of things, worship inevitably follows.
Anyone who comes to grips with the issues raised in The Marrow of Modern Divinity will almost certainly grow by leaps and bounds in understanding three things: the grace of God, the Christian life, and the very nature of the gospel itself.
Jesus Christ is able to set us free because He has dealt with the sin that enslaves us.
Our thinking about who we are as Christians should not begin with what we can discover about ourselves by self-analysis. Rather, it begins with what God says about those who trust in Christ.
The Son of God came to dwell in human flesh for us in order that He might come to dwell in us by His Spirit.
To be free from the possibility of discouragements would be more ‘spiritual’ than Jesus-and therefore not truly spiritual at all.
God can be trusted even when he cannot be seen or understood.
Christians have a new identity. We are no longer 'in Adam' but 'in Christ'; no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit.
There is a difference between a well-instructed congregation and a well-nourished one.
God is God; you are but one of His creatures. Your only joy is to be found in obeying Him, your true fulfillment is to be found in worshiping Him, your only wisdom is to be found in trusting and knowing Him.
You cannot open the pages of the New Testament without realizing that one of the things that makes it so 'new,' in every way, is that here men and women call God 'Father.' This conviction, that we can speak of the Master of the universe in such intimate terms, lies at the heart of the Christian faith.
My security as a Christian does not reside in the strength of my faith but in the indestructibili ty of my Savior.
Remember that you are not saved by increased levels of holiness, however desirable it is that you should reach them. ...It is Christ who saves us-through faith. Your faith is a poor and crumbling thing, as is your spiritual service. Jesus Christ alone is qualified and able to save you because of what He has done.
Knowing God is your single greatest privilege as a Christian
Regeneration, however it is described, is a divine activity in us, in which we are not the actors but the recipients.
Thoughts for Young Men abounds in reliable counsel and says - with a rare combination of seriousness and graciousness - the very things we need to hear. Young men, for whom it was written, will find it invaluable; but all Christians, men or women, young or old, can read it with lasting benefit. It deserves to be widely read and circulated, and will do spiritual good to every reader.
