“I am an historian, the elders should protect the sinner from the church. When a sinner is defiant, the elders should protect the church from the sinner.”

“…a man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner, but as righteous…” – John Calvin

“The Elect that the Father gives to the Son are preserved by the Son. The basis of our assurance is not to be based upon a confidence of our ability to persevere. We talk about the Perseverance of the Saints and I believe that the saints do in fact persevere but the reason that they persevere is because they are preserved and so it’s better to speak of the preservation of the saints than the perseverance of the saints and so we hear in this chapter Jesus appeals to the Father that those who have been given to Him may be kept.” – R.C. Sproul – Gaining True Assurance part 5 in The Assurance of Salvation series

“A ‘moral’ atheist is like a man sitting down to dinner who doesn’t believe in farmers, ranchers, fishermen, or cooks.” – Greg Koukl

“Where God’s wrath is no longer a problem, Christ’s cross is no longer the solution.” – Michael Horton

“The heart of most religions is good advice, good techniques, good programs, good ideas, and good support systems. These drive us deeper into ourselves, to find our inner light, inner goodness, inner voice, or inner resources. Nothing new can be found inside us. These is no inner rescuer deep down in my soul; I just hear echoes of my own voice telling me all sorts of crazy things to numb my sense of fear, anxiety, and boredom, the origins of which I cannot truly identify. But the heart of Christianity is Good News. It comes not as a task for us to fulfill, a mission for us to accomplish, a game plan for us to follow with the help of life coaches, but as a report that someone else has already fulfilled, accomplished, followed, and achieved everything for us. Good advice may help us in daily direction; the Good News concerning Jesus Christ saves us from sin’s guilt and tyranny over our lives and the fear of death. It’s Good News because it does not depend on us. It is about God and his faithfulness to his own purposes and promises.” – Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life, p.20

Philip Yancey on G.K. Chesterton on pleasure, in the introduction to Chesterton’s 1908 autobiography Orthodoxy (repr.; New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2001), xiv-xv:

“Although Chesterton was a helpful guide on the problem of pain, he seemed equally fascinated with its opposite, the problem of pleasure. He found materialism too thin to account for the sense of wonder and delight that sometimes marks the world, a sense that gives an almost magical dimension to such basic human acts as sex, and childbirth, and artistic creation.

Why is sex fun? Reproduction surely doesn’t require pleasure: Some animals simply split in half to reproduce, and even humans use methods of artificial insemination that involves no pleasure. Why is eating enjoyable? Plants and the lower animals manage to obtain their quota of nutrients without the luxury of taste buds. Why are there colors? Some people get along fine without the ability to detect color. Why complicate vision for all the rest of us?

It struck me, after reading my umpteenth book on the problem of pain, that I had never even seen a book on “the problem of pleasure.” Nor have I met a philosopher who goes around shaking his head in perplexity over the question of why we experience pleasure. Yet it looms as a huge question – the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. On the issue of pleasure, Christians can breathe easier. A good and loving God would naturally want his creatures to experience delight, joy and personal fulfillment. We Christians start from that assumption and then look for ways to explain the origin of suffering. But should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?”

Yancey on Chesterton, Orthodoxy, xvi:

“Where did pleasure come from? After searching alternatives, Chesterton settled on Christianity as the only reasonable explanation for its existence in the world. Moments of pleasure are the remnants washed ashore from the shipwreck, bits of Paradise extended through time. We must hold these relics lightly, and use them with humility and restraint, never seizing them as our entitlements….

Guided by Chesterton, I came to see sex, money, power and sensory pleasures as God’s gifts which, in a fallen world, must be handled with care, like explosives. We have lost the untainted innocence of Eden, and now every good thing represents risk as well, holding within it the potential for abuse. Eating becomes gluttony, love becomes lust, and along the way we lose sight of the One who gives us pleasure. The ancients turned good things into idols; we moderns call them addictions. In either case, what ceases to be a servant becomes a tyrant.”

“People who do not actually read the Bible confidently assure us that when we move from the Old Testament into the New, the theme of divine judgment fades into the background; but if we examine the New Testament… we find at once that the Old Testament’s emphasis on God’s action as judge, far from being reduced is actually intensified.” – J. I. Packer, Knowing God, 158.

“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)

“All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You wake up on Sunday morning and you can smell the smoke of hell on one side and feel the crisp breezes of heaven on the other . . . The dangers of self-reliance and self-exaltation in the ministry of preaching are so insidious that God will strike us if he must in order to break us of our self-assurance and the casual use of our professional techniques” – John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, pp. 37-38

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be “much not many.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

“I wear the righteousness of the Son of God. I do not come as I am. I come as I AM is.” – RC Sproul, Jr.

“Not the labors of my hands can fulfill the Law’s demands; could my zeal no respite know, could my tears forever flow, all for sin could not atone; thou must save, and thou alone.” – Augustus Toplady

“The clear message from Genesis to Revelation is either go to hell with your own righteousness, or go to heaven with the righteousness of Christ credited to your account by faith alone. Faith in Christ is saving; faith in anything or anyone else is superstition.” – Michael Horton

“Patience! patience! you are always in a hurry, but God is not.” – C.H. Spurgeon