“The gospel continually reminds us, “It’s Christmas time!”” – John Fonville

Noël Piper says about Advent: “For four weeks, it’s as if we’re re-enacting, remembering the thousands of years God’s people were anticipating and longing for the coming of God’s salvation, for Jesus. That’s what advent means—coming. Even God’s men who foretold the grace that was to come didn’t know “what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating.” They were waiting, but they didn’t know what God’s salvation would look like.”

“The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law–the same right we have.” – Ronald Reagan

“The nature of the Divine goodness is not only to open to those who knock. but also to cause them to knock and ask.” – Augustine

“Zeal without doctrine is like a sword in the hand of a lunatic.” – John Calvin

“Justification is being declared righteous. Sanctification is being made righteous—being conformed to the image of Christ. Justification is our position before God. Sanctification is our practice. You don’t practice justification! It happens once for all, upon conversion. Justification is objective—Christ’s work for us. Sanctification is subjective—Christ’s work within us. Justification is immediate and complete upon conversion. You will never be more justified than you are the first moment you trust in the person and finished work of Christ. Sanctification is a process. You will be more sanctified as you continue in grace-motivated obedience.” – C. J. Mahaney

“Many Christians dread the thought of leaving this world. Why? Because so many have stored up their treasures on earth, not in heaven. Each day brings us closer to death. If your treasures are on earth, that means each day brings you closer to losing your treasures. He who lays up treasures on earth spends his life backing away from his treasures. To him, death is loss… He who lays up treasures in heaven looks forward to eternity; he’s moving daily toward his treasures. To him, death is gain. He who spends his life moving toward his treasures has reason to rejoice. Are you despairing or rejoicing?” – Randy Alcorn

“No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. The pulpit can be a shop window to display one’s talents; the prayer closet allows no showing off.” – Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries

“If a woman plans to terminate her pregnancy, she commonly refers to the life within her as the ‘fetus’. But if she intends to deliver and love and care for the little child, she affectionately calls him ‘my baby’.” – Dr. James C. Dobson

“Monergistic regeneration is exclusively a divine act. Man does not have the creative power God has. To quicken a person who is spiritually dead is something only God can do.” – R.C. Sproul

PENDULUM SWING – Though at one stage in Church history, the Church over-emphasized the wrath and judgment of God (many were rightly categorized as “hellfire and damnation preachers”); yet now the pendulum has fully swung the other way and all that many people have ever heard about is a very shallow and unbiblical idea of the love of God. People no longer live in the fear of God, and yet the Bible tells us “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” In His love, God sent His Son to save sinners from His fierce and just wrath against sin. How urgent it is that all flee to Christ as a refuge! He is the only Savior, the holy sin-bearer for all who trust in Him. – John Samson

Advice for Preachers – “Some of you may recall the advice that Martin Luther gave to his friend Philip Melanchthon when he was setting out on his career. “Always preach”, said Luther, “in such a way that if the people do not come to hate their sin, they will instead hate you.”” – Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Expository Sermons on 2 Peter

“Without conversion of heart we cannot serve God on earth. We have naturally neither faith, nor fear, nor love, toward God and His Son Jesus Christ. We have no delight in His Word. We take no pleasure in prayer or communion with Him. We have no enjoyment in His ordinances, His house, His people, or His day. We may have a form of Christianity, and keep up a round of ceremonies and religious performances. But without conversion we have no more heart in our religion than a brick or a stone. Can a dead corpse serve God? We know it cannot. Well, without conversion we are dead toward God.” – J.C. Ryle

“If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is “of him” [1 Cor. 1:30]. If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. For by his birth he was made like us in all respects [Heb. 2:17] that he might learn to feel our pain [cf. Heb. 5:2].

If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross [Gal. 3:13]; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood, if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given him to judge.

In short, since rich store of every kind of goods abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.” – John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.16.19

“For every look at self—take ten looks at Christ! Live near to Jesus—and all things will appear little to you in comparison with eternal realities. How many millions of dazzling pearls and gems are at this moment hidden in the deep recesses of the ocean caves. Likewise, unfathomable oceans of grace are in Christ for you. Dive and dive again—you will never come to the bottom of these depths!” – Robert Murray McCheyne (1813-1843)

“It is better to have God approve, than the world applaud.” – Thomas Watson

“No therapist, no psychiatrist can relieve you of guilt. He or she may help you to resolve feelings of false guilt that can arise for a variety of reasons. Prescription drugs may provide certain kinds of ease. But no therapy, no course of drugs, can deliver you from real guilt. Why? Because being guilty is not a medical condition or a chemical disorder. It is a spiritual reality. It concerns your standing before God. The psychiatrist cannot forgive you; the therapist cannot absolve you; the counselor cannot pardon you. But the message of the Gospel is this: God can forgive you, and He is willing to do so.” – Sinclair Ferguson

“Jesus’ life was a storm of controversy. The apostles, like the prophets before them, could hardly go a day without controversy. Paul said that he debated daily in the marketplace. To avoid controversy is to avoid Christ. We can have peace, but it is a servile and carnal peace where truth is slain in the streets.” – R.C. Sproul

“It is not your hold of Christ that saves, but his hold of you!” – C.H. Spurgeon

“Calvin was a thoroughly independent student of Scripture, and brought forth from that treasure-house things not only old but new; and if it was not given to him to recover for the world so revolutionizing a doctrine as that of Justification by Faith alone, the contributions of his fertile thought to doctrinal advance were neither few nor unimportant. He made an epoch in the history of the doctrine of the Trinity: by his insistence on “self-existence” as a proper attribute of Son and Spirit as well as of the Father, he drove out the lingering elements of Subordinationism, and secured to the Church a deepened consciousness of the co-equality of the Divine Persons. He introduced the presentation of the work of Christ under the rubrics of the threefold office of Prophet, Priest, and King. He created the whole discipline of Christian Ethics. But above all he gave to the Church the entire doctrine of the Work of the Holy Spirit, profoundly conceived and wrought out in its details, with its fruitful distinctions of common and efficacious grace, of noötic, aisthetic, and thelematic effects, — a gift, we venture to think, so great, so pregnant with benefit to the Church as fairly to give him a place by the side of Augustine and Anselm and Luther,as the Theologian of the Holy Spirit, as they were respectively the Theologian of Grace, of the Atonement, and of Justification.” – B.B. Warfield

“Whenever you come and hear the gospel, be you sure of this, whether you receive it or not, the kingdom of God has come nigh unto you. Even if you stop your ears, and will have none of it, yet God has visited you in tender mercy, in that by the gospel he tells you that there is a way of salvation, that there is a plan for the remission of sin.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“God used Jonathan Edwards mightily during the eighteenth-century Great Awakening in New England. Edwards was a firm believer in the doctrine of election. He believed that unless God had chosen a person, elected him to salvation, that person would never come to faith. Nevertheless, he pled, cajoled, and scared people half to death, telling them to repent and come to faith, because he did not know who was numbered among the elect. I share Edwards’s perspective, assuming the election of every person I meet. I cannot read others’ hearts, and I do not now the hidden decrees of God, which are none of my business.” – R.C. Sproul, St. Andrew’s Expositional Commentary on Romans

“…in reality and in practice the “magisterium” trumps both Scripture and tradition for a member of the Roman communion. It doesn’t matter that not one church father taught, held, believed, or practiced (for example) papal infallibility, transubstantiation, or the bodily assumption of Mary. It doesn’t matter that Scripture doesn’t teach those things. Rome says it, they believe it, and that settles it. Sola Ecclesia.” – Dr. James White

“Rom 9:15 “For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” In these words the Lord in the plainest manner claims the right to give or to withhold His mercy according to His own sovereign will.” – C.H. Spurgeon

“Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where man’s power ends.” – George Muller

“Our faith is really and truly tested only when we are brought into very severe conflicts, and when even hell itself seems opened to swallow us up.” – John Calvin

“God doesn’t love you because you repented. You repented because He loved you.” – R C Sproul, Jr

“If people don’t see the comparison of the killing of six million Jews with the slaughter of nearly sixty million Americans through abortion, it’s probably because they don’t consider a baby in the womb to be human. That’s exactly what Hitler did with the Jews. He said that they weren’t human, and then he made billions when he killed them and seized their assets. American abortion makes billions through the slaughter of the unborn, and like the Nazi machine it is a well-run money-making industry that has been successful in brainwashing millions into believing that a baby is something other than a baby.” – Ray Comfort

“It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.” – A.A. Hodge

1. Substitute anything for Christ, and the Gospel is totally spoiled!

2. Add anything to Christ, and the Gospel ceases to be a pure Gospel!

3. Put anything between a person and Christ, and that person will neglect Christ for that very thing!

4. Spoil the proportions of Christ’s Gospel, and you spoil its efficacy!

5. Evangelical religion must be the Gospel, the whole Gospel and nothing but the Gospel.” – J.C. Ryle

“Since there remains nothing for men, as to themselves, but to perish, being smitten by the just judgment of God, they are to be justified freely through his mercy; for Christ comes to the aid of this misery, and communicates himself to believers, so that they find in him alone all those things in which they are wanting. There is, perhaps, no passage in the whole Scripture which illust…rates in a more striking manner the efficacy of his righteousness; for it shows that God’s mercy is the efficient cause, that Christ with his blood is the meritorious cause, that the formal or the instrumental cause is faith in the word, and that moreover, the final cause is the glory of the divine justice and goodness.” – John Calvin

“Calvinists teach that [Limited Atonement] is necessary to preserve the two basic attributes of God, namely his justice and the integrity of his purposes. The argument goes like this: Suppose I were to owe you a thousand dollars but was unable to pay my debt. But a kind friend intervenes and pays you what I owe. But you still elicit a payment from me, asking that I pay every last cent. Would that be just? I think not. If my friend paid my debt, justice requires that I be free. The analogy is clear: if Christ’s sacrifice was for all men then either all men will be saved or God will be unfairly demanding from sinners what has already been paid. If Christ died for people who will be in hell, his justice is in jeopardy. How could a righteous God demand a double payment for the same debt?” – Erwin Lutzer

“Some people react against the doctrine of limited atonement because it appears to take away from the greatness of the work of Christ. In reality, it’s the Arminian position that diminishes and devalues the full impact and power of the atonement. The point Calvinists stress is that Christ accomplished what He set out to accomplish, the job the Father had designed for Him to do. God’s sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it.” – R.C. Sproul, The Truth of the Cross