“Subject to none, influenced by none, absolutely independent: God does as He pleases, only as He pleases. None can thwart Him, none can hinder Him.” – A. W. Pink

“True repentance will entirely change you; the bias of your souls will be changed, then you will delight in God, in Christ, in His Law, and in His people.” – George Whitefield

“Grace doesn’t free you from the call to obey, but liberates you from the delusion that you can obey your way into God’s acceptance.” – P. Tripp

“Christians are in themselves no wiser than are other men. What they have, they have by grace. They must be ‘all things to all men.’ But it is not kindness to tell patients that need strong medicine that nothing serious is wrong with them. Christians are bound to tell men the truth about themselves; that is the only way of bringing them to recognize the mercy, the compassion, of Christ. For if men are told the truth about themselves, and if they are warned against the false remedies that establish men in their wickedness, then, by the power of the Spirit of God, they will flee to the Christ through whom alone they must be saved.” – Cornelius Van Til

“In modern day evangelism, this precious doctrine [of regeneration] has been reduced to nothing more than a human decision to raise one’s hand, walk an aisle, or pray a ‘sinner’s prayer.’ As a result, the majority of Americans believe that they’ve been ‘born again’ (i.e., regenerated) even though their thoughts, words, and deeds are a continual contradiction to the nature and will of God.” – Paul Washer

“A soul dead in sin is insensible to any real distress because of sin; a heart destitute of love to God, feels no distress because it does not love Him. A graceless sinner never longs for grace: an unrenewed person never thirsts for holiness, and a dead soul never breathes after life. Take heart, then, O believer, for your soul-sorrow is the prelude to your soul’s eternal joy.” – Octavius Winslow

John 6:37 All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.

“It is a moral and spiritual impossibility for a person to come to Christ apart from the Father’s drawing. What we find now is that it is a moral and spiritual impossibility for the person given by the Father to the Son NOT to come. There is, by Jesus’ verdict, the invariable conjunction of these two diverse kinds of action: ‘All that the Father giveth me shall come to me…’ There is invincible efficacy in the Father’s action, and this means grace irresistible.” – John Murray

Addressing those who convert from a profession of faith in the Gospel to Roman Catholicism, Dr. James White speaks of “… the standard ‘conversionist blindspot’ problems that we have seen over and over again with those who think that jumping into the arms of Romanism will give them the certainty they have come to conclude God’s Word and Spirit are incapable of providing, especially the obvious one: your fallible choice to follow Rome (which is NOT the ‘only game in town’) means that your level of certainty can never rise above the level of your own fallible choice.”

“I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion is already born.” – Ronald Reagan

“The Theory of Evolution gave what Hitler saw as a legitimate license to kill off those for which he considered to be inferior–six million Jews, Gypsies, people of dark skin, homosexuals and others, and at the same time reap the benefit of increased popularity and of billions of dollars for his war machine. And that’s why so many tolerate the elimination of what it is in the womb. It’s no big deal. There’s no ultimate right or wrong. We’re just animals, and animals often kill their offspring.” – Ray Comfort

“What matters supremely is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it–the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind.” – J.I. Packer

“Vine’s assertions is that Calvinism is hindering evangelism. Show me the proof… No, really. Where’s the proof? That’s poppycock. We may report a slightly lower number of “salvations” because our kids don’t get saved twice a year at church camp between the ages of 13 and 18. We may have slightly lower numbers of Baptisms, because we require subjects for baptism actually be regenerate (and we don’t baptize 4 year [olds] just because they can say ‘I asked Jesus in my heart’ into a microphone). We don’t do Judgement Houses to scare people into Heaven. And yet Calvinist-leaning churches are JUST as engaged (if not more so) in church planting and global evangelism.” – J.D. Hall

“When I consider the brief span of my life, absorbed into the eternity before and after, the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me? … The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” – Pascal, Pensées, Fragment 230

“The more sanctified a person is the more heavily weighted his prayer time is in adoration.” – R.C. Sproul

“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Francis Turretin (1623-87) on the necessity of good works as they relate to justification:

Although we acknowledge the necessity of good works against the Epicureans, we do not on this account confound the law and the gospel and interfere with gratuitous justification by faith alone. Good works are required not for living according to the law, but because we live by the gospel; not as the causes on account of which life is given to us, but as effects which testify that life has been given to us. (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 2.705)

And here is Turretin on the necessity of good works as they relate to our final glorification:

For since good works have the relation of the means to the end (Jn. 3:5, 16; Mt. 5:8); of the “way” to the goal (Eph. 2:10, Phil. 3:14); of the “sowing” to the harvest (Gal. 6:7, 8); of the “firstfruits” to the mass (Rom. 8:23); of labor to the reward (Mt. 20:1); of the “contest” to the crown (2 Tim. 2:5; 4:8), everyone sees that there is the highest and an indispensable necessity of good works for obtaining glory. It is so great that it cannot be reached without them (Heb. 12:14; Rev. 21:27). (2.705)

So to summarize: good works are the effect of justification (not the cause) and the means to the end of glorification. And for the record, when Turretin speaks of “good works” he means that which is (1) done from faith, (2) according to the will of God in Scripture, (3) from the heart), and (4) for the glory of God (2.706).

“The only certain proof of my election is that today I am following the Lord.” – R.C. Lucas

“Relativists can’t hold meaningful moral discussions. What’s there to talk about? If morals are entirely relative and all views are equal, then no way of thinking is better than another. No moral position can be judged as adequate or deficient, unreasonable, acceptable, or even barbaric. If ethical disputes make sense only when morals are objective, then relativism can only be consistently lived …out in silence. For this reason, it is rare to meet a rational and consistent relativist, as most are quick to impose their own moral rules like “It’s wrong to push your own morality on others”. This puts relativists in an untenable position – if they speak up about moral issues, they surrender their relativism; if they do not speak up, they surrender their humanity. If the notion of moral discourse makes sense intuitively, then moral relativism is false.” – Greg Koukl

“Since Satan cannot destroy the gospel, he has too often neutralized its usefulness by addition, subtraction, or substitution.” – J.C. Ryle

“Reformed theology so far transcends the mere five points of Calvinism that it is an entire worldview.” – R.C. Sproul

“To revise the gospel to make a greater impact upon culture, is to pervert its truth, diminish its power and leave the world without hope!” – Paul Washer

“Original sin is in us like our beard. We are shaved today and look clean; tomorrow our beard has grown again, nor does it cease growing while we remain on earth. In like manner original sin cannot be extirpated from us; it springs up in us as long as we live.” – Martin Luther

For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. – Matthew 12

“The true Christian regards all Christ’s friends as his friends, members of the same body, children of the same family, soldiers in the same army, travelers to the same home. When he meets them, he feels as if he had long known them. He is more at home with them in a few minutes, than he is with many worldly people after an acquaintance of several years. And what is the secret of all this? It is simply affection to the same Savior and love to the same Lord.” – J.C. Ryle

The Bible alone tells us what the Gospel is and how it ought to be taught to men. Our mission message and methodology must be shaped by the exegete and theologian; not the anthropologist, sociologist or church growth guru.

“Scripture represents man as one who is not only bound, wretched, captive, sick, and dead, but in addition to his other miseries is afflicted, through the agency of Satan his prince, with this misery of blindness, so that he believes himself to be free, happy, unfettered, able, well, and alive.” – Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, in LW 33:130

“Human will-power always fails. It is a human attempt to do God’s work with our own resources. But working out of self-dependence is guilt-inducing and exhausting. It impels the egoist to seek relief in pleasure and self-fulfillment, to use the good things of God as drugs to escape from reality. Self-fulfillment then takes over as the person’s grand task in life leaving the person burdened with suppressed guilt and shame. Unfortunately the person seeking self-fulfillment never finds happiness. Instead, his inner life shrivels and dries up. But let this person look away from self-interest, fight self-preoccupation, and set the affectional life on Christ and His cause. Christ is alive; He is the giant Son of God. He walks through the earth. Those who walk with Him know that Christ and the cause of the gospel really do introduce us to the deeply satisfying love of God.” – Jack Miller, ‘Recovering the Grand Cause,’ a paper written in 1993 to set the vision for a missionary training center to be launched in London

“History is silent about revivals that did not begin with prayer.” – J. Edwin Orr

What Do You See At The Cross? by John Calvin

They crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. – The Gospel According to St. John 19:18

“As if the severity of the punishment had not been sufficient of itself, he is hanged in the midst between two robbers, as if he not only had deserved to be classed with other robbers, but had been the most wicked and the most detestable of them all. We ought always to remember that the wicked executioners of Christ did nothing but what had been determined by the hand and purpose of God; for God did not surrender his Son to their lawless passions, but determined that, according to his own will and good pleasure, he should be offered as a sacrifice. And if there were the best reasons for the purpose of God in all those things which he determined that his Son should suffer, we ought to consider, on the one hand, the dreadful weight of his wrath against sin, and, on the other hand, his infinite goodness towards us. In no other way could our guilt be removed than by the Son of God becoming a curse for us. We see him driven out into an accursed place, as if he had been polluted by a mass of all sorts of crimes, that there he might appear to be accursed before God and men. Assuredly, we are prodigiously stupid if we do not plainly see, in this mirror, with what abhorrence God regards sin; and we are harder than stones if we do not tremble at such a judgment as this.

When, on the other hand, God declares that our salvation was so dear to him that he did not spare his only-begotten Son, what abundant goodness and what astonishing grace do we here behold! Whoever, then, takes a just view of the causes of the death of Christ, together with the advantage which it yields to us, will not, like the Greeks, regard the doctrlne of the cross as foolishness, nor, like the Jews, will he regard it as an offense (1 Corinthians 1:23), but rather as an invaluable token and pledge of the power, and wisdom, and righteousness, and goodness of God.”