?”The only thing that a man can contribute to his own redemption is the sin from which he needs to be redeemed.” – William Temple
“In America today, it is considered worse to judge evil than to do evil.” – Os Guinness
“Suppose the first American astronauts to walk on the moon had brought back, along with moon rocks, an oblong black box that appeared from the outside to have been crafted by machines. Suppose further that, when opened, the box contained the workings of a camera: it had parts that functioned like the lens, shutter, and other components of a camera. Obviously, such an object would excite enormous and justifiable curiosity about how it came to be. It is hard to imagine any skeptic’s gaining respect by maintaining that the principle of sufficient reason did not apply to such an object. Equally absurd would be efforts to explain the box in terms of chance, natural forces. The very nature of the object pointed to its having been made by an intelligent being. The human mind properly balks at the suggestion that a cameralike object was produced by chance, natural forces. But then how much more should we reject claims that something far more intricate, such as the human eye, resulted from anything less than an intelligent being.” Ronald Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994, p. 135.)
“If God were unkind enough to answer some of our prayers at once, and in our way, we should be very impoverished Christians. God sometimes delays His answer in order to deal with selfishness or things in our lives which should not be there.” – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“God did not elect any sinner because He foresaw that he would believe, for the simple but sufficient reason that no sinner ever believes until God gives him faith, just as no man sees until God gives him sight.” – A. W. Pink
“To despise doctrine is to despise the Word of God.” – R. C. Sproul
“My name from the palms of his hands, eternity will not erase; impressed on his heart it remains, in marks of indelible grace.” – Augustus Toplady
“We do not make friends with God; God makes friends with us, bringing us to know him by making his love known to us… The word know, when used of God in this way, is a sovereign-grace word, pointing to God’s initiative in loving, choosing, redeeming, calling and preserving.” – J. I. Packer
“You can do more than pray, after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.” – John Bunyan
“Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once, and He volunteered.” – R. C. Sproul
“We are already God’s sheep, before we are aware that He is our shepherd.” – John Calvin
“Wherefore all theology, when separated from Christ, is not only vain and confused, but is also mad, deceitful, and spurious; for, though the philosophers sometimes utter excellent sayings, yet they have nothing but what is short-lived, and even mixed up with wicked and erroneous sentiments.” – John Calvin
“The devil is orthodox in his faith; he believes the true scheme of doctrine; he is no Deist, Socinian, Arian, Pelagian, or antinomian; the articles of his faith are all sound.” – Jonathan Edwards, ‘True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils,’ in Works, Hickman ed., 2:43
[This editorial is found in Peace and Truth, the magazine of the Sovereign Grace Union, written by John Brentnall – www.sgu.org.uk]
Calvin says the same: those who try to overturn “that prime article of our faith . . . God’s eternal predestination . . . demonstrate their malice no less than their ignorance.” In view of his approaching death, he wrote: “I John Calvin, servant of the Word of God in the Church of Geneva . . . have no other hope or refuge than His predestination, on which my entire salvation is grounded.”