“The thought struck me, How did you come to be a Christian? I sought the Lord. But how did you come to seek the Lord? The truth flashed across my mind in a moment—I should not have sought him unless there had been some previous influence in my mind to make me seek him. I prayed, thought I, but then I asked myself, How came I to pray? I was induced to pray by reading the Scriptures. How came I to read the Scriptures? I did read them, but what led me to do so?

Then, in a moment, I saw that God was at the bottom of it all, and that he was the Author of my faith, and so the whole doctrine of grace opened up to me, and from that doctrine I have not departed to this day, and I desire to make this my constant confession, ‘I ascribe my change wholly to God.'” – C. H. Spurgeon, as quoted in Dave Harvey, Am I Called? The Summons to Pastoral Ministry (Crossway, 2012), 38

“What ‘tunes my heart to sing God’s grace’ is not music, lighting, or atmosphere, but the gospel of Jesus Christ.” – Bob Kauflin

“The sin of Adam did not make the condemnation of all men merely possible; it was the ground of their actual condemnation. So the righteousness of Christ did not make the salvation of men merely possible, it secured the actual salvation of those for whom He wrought.” – Charles Hodge

“All that mankind have heaped up to themselves against the day of God’s holy and righteous wrath — their forgetfulness of God, their selfish conduct, their disobedience, pride, worldly-mindedness, their filthy lusts, hypocrisy, falsehood, hardheartedness, and deceit — all are united and mingled in this cup, and ferment together into a horrible potion.

‘Shall I not drink this cup?’ asks the Saviour.

‘Yes,’ we reply, ‘empty it, beloved Immanuel! We will kiss thy feet, and offer up ourselves to Thee upon Thy holy altar!’

He has emptied it, and not a drop remains for His people. The satisfaction He rendered was complete, the reconciliation effected, and now nothing remains for us but to sing Hallelujah!” – F. W. Krummacher

“If anyone should ask me what I mean by a Calvinist, I should reply, “He is one who says, Salvation is of the Lord.” I cannot find in Scripture any other doctrine than this. It is the essence of the Bible. “He only is my rock and my salvation.” Tell me anything contrary to this truth, and it will be a heresy; tell me a heresy, and I shall find its essence here, that it has departed from this great, this fundamental, this rock-truth, “God is my rock and my salvation.” What is the heresy of Rome, but the addition of something to the perfect merits of Jesus Christ—the bringing in of the works of the flesh, to assist in our justification? And what is the heresy of Arminianism but the addition of something to the work of the Redeemer? Every heresy, if brought to the touchstone, will discover itself here. I have my own private opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and Him crucified, unless we preach what nowadays is called Calvinism. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism; Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else. I do not believe we can preach the gospel, if we do not preach justification by faith, without works; nor unless we preach the sovereignty of God in His dispensation of grace; nor unless we exalt the electing, unchangeable, eternal, immutable, conquering love of Jehovah; nor do I think we can preach the gospel, unless we base it upon the special and particular redemption of His elect and chosen people which Christ wrought out upon the cross; nor can I comprehend a gospel which lets saints fall away after they are called, and suffers the children of God to be burned in the fires of damnation after having once believed in Jesus. Such a gospel I abhor.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“Our fair morning is at hand; the daystar is near the rising, and we are not many miles from home. What matter, then, of ill-entertainment in the smoky inns of this worthless world? We are not to stay here, and we shall be dearly welcome to Him to whom we are going.” – Samuel Rutherford

“A yet further charge against us is, that we dare not preach the gospel to the unregenerate, that, in fact, our theology is so narrow and cramped that we cannot preach to sinners. Gentlemen, if you dare to say this, I would take you to any library in the world where the old Puritan fathers are stored up, and I would let you take down any one volume and tell me if you ever rend more telling exhortations and addresses to sinners in any of your own books. Did not Bunyan plead with sinners, and whoever classed him with any but the Calvinists? Did not Charnock, Goodwin, and how we agonise for souls, and what were they but Calvinists? Did not Jonathan Edwards preach to sinners, and who more clear and explicit on these doctrinal matters. The works of our innumerable divines teem with passionate appeals to the unconverted. Oh, sirs, if I should begin the list, time should fail me. It is an indisputable fact that we have laboured more than they all for the winning of souls. Was George Whitefield any the less seraphic? Did his eyes weep the fewer tears or his bowels move with the less compassion because he believed in God’s electing love and preached the sovereignty of the Most High? It is an unfounded calumny. Our souls are not stony; our bowels are not withdrawn from the compassion which we ought to feel for our fellow-men; we can hold all our views firmly, and yet can weep as Christ did over a Jerusalem which was certainly to be destroyed. Again, I must say, I am not defending certain brethren who have exaggerated Calvinism. I speak of Calvinism proper, not that which has run to seed, and outgrown its beauty and verdure. I speak of it as I find it in Calvin’s Institutes, and especially in his Expositions. I have read them carefully. I take not my views of Calvinism from common repute but from his books. Nor do I, in thus speaking, even vindicate Calvinism as if I cared for the name, but I mean that glorious system which teaches that salvation is of grace from first to last. And again, then, I say it is an utterly unfounded charge that we dare not preach to sinners.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“As the gospel is purely a matter of revelation given to the apostles by God, we cannot add to it, or subtract from it. So anything that may have happened in the world since the writing of the New Testament makes not the slightest difference. We are dealing here with things about God and eternity, and we know nothing about them. On this subject there has been no additional knowledge during the last two thousand years. None at all.” – Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Love so Amazing

“Faith says not, ‘I see that it is good for me, so God must have sent it,’ but, ‘God sent it, and so it must be good for me.'” – Phillips Brooks

“It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.” – Claude Bernard

“The decree of election is a secret decree. And since no revelation has been given to the preacher as to which ones among his hearers are elect and which are non elect, it is not possible for him to present the Gospel to the elect only. It is his duty to look with hope on all those to whom he is preaching, and to pray for them that they may each be among the elect. In order to offer the message to the elect, he must offer it to all; and the Scripture command is plain to the effect that it should be offered to all. Even the elect must hear before they can believe and accept.” (Romans 10:13-17) – Lorraine Boettner

“There is a common, worldly kind of Christianity in this day, which many have, and think they have enough – a cheap Christianity which offends nobody, and requires no sacrifice – which costs nothing, and is worth nothing.” – J.C. Ryle

“A sin is two sins when it is defended.” – Henry Smith

“Peace is such a precious jewel that I would give anything for it but truth.” – Matthew Henry

“The Lord Jesus Christ, of whom I now speak, is very jealous of your love, O believer. Did he not choose you? He cannot bear that you should choose another. Did he not buy you with his own blood? He cannot endure that you should think you are your own, or that you belong to this world. He loved you with such a love that he could not stop in heaven without you; he would sooner die than that you should perish; he stripped himself to nakedness that he might clothe you with beauty; he bowed his face to shame and spitting that he might lift you up to honour and glory, and he cannot endure that you should love the world, and the things of the world. His love is strong as death towards you, and therefore will be cruel as the grave. He will be as a cruel one towards you if you do not love him with a perfect heart. He will take away that husband; he will smite that child; he will bring you from riches to poverty, from health to sickness, even to the gates of the grave, because he loves you so much that he cannot endure that anything should stand between your heart’s love and him. Be careful, Christians, you that are married to Christ; remember, you are married to a jealous husband.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“It [is] impossible… to be converted to Christ while at the same time loving (your) sin. It is true that anybody who comes to Christ will come with sin. In fact, he or she will come precisely because of that sin – that is, to be rid of it and its awful result. But to come to Christ while loving and cherishing sin is totally impossible. It is like an airplane trying to fly in two directions!” – Jim Elliff

“Nearness to God brings likeness to God. The more you see God the more of God will be seen in you.” -C. H. Spurgeon

“If we avoid speaking of God’s wrath, of God’s justice, of the coming day of divine judgment, of Jesus’ death as an atoning sacrifice for us, we are not changing the form of the missionary presentation of the gospel but its content. The foundational centrality of “Christ crucified” is of critical importance for the existence of the local church. In mission and evangelism the search for a presentation of the gospel that will convince listeners is misguided if the fact of Jesus’ death on the cross and the significance of this death are not central to that message.

The cross has been and always will be regarded as a religious scandal and as intellectual nonsense. The search for a message that is more easily comprehensible must never attempt to eliminate the provocative nature of the news of Jesus the messianic Son of God who came to die so that sinners can be forgiven by God who hates sin and judges sinners on the Day of Judgment. Paul knows that it is only the power of God, the “proof” of God’s Spirit working in people, that convinces unbelievers of the truth of the news of Jesus and that leads them to faith in Jesus the Messiah and Savior.” – Eckhard Schnabel, Paul the Missionary, 399-400

“The God of most men — the God of the unregenerate — is an inanimate God, or, if alive and able to see, he is an unfeeling God, careless about them and their personal interests. “Oh, it is preposterous,” say they, “to think that he takes notice of our sorrows and troubles — and still more absurd to suppose that he hears prayer, or that he ever interferes in answer to the voice of supplication, to g…rant a poor man his requests. It cannot be.” That is their God, you see. That is the God of the heathen — a dead, blind, dumb God. I do not wonder that they do not pray to him. They could not expect an answer.

But the God of grace is one who has opened a communication between heaven and earth, who notices the cries of his children, puts their tears into his bottle, sympathises with their sorrows, looks down on them with an eye of pity and a father’s love, has communion with them, and permits them to have communion with him, and all that through the blessed person of the Lord Jesus Christ.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“If the Holy Spirit guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them.” – George Muller

“The doctrines of our election, and free justification in Christ Jesus are daily more and more pressed upon my heart. They fill my soul with a holy fire and afford me great confidence in God my Saviour.

I hope we shall catch fire from each other, and that there will be a holy emulation amongst us, who shall most debase man and exalt the Lord Jesus. Nothing but the doctrines of the Reformation can do this. All others leave free will in man and make him, in part at least, a Saviour to himself. . . .

I know Christ is all in all. Man is nothing: he hath a free will to go to hell, but none to go to heaven, till God worketh in him to will and to do of His good pleasure.

Oh the excellency of the doctrine of election and of the saints’ final perseverance! I am persuaded, till a man comes to believe and feel these important truths, he cannot come out of himself, but when convinced of these, and assured of their application to his own heart, he then walks by faith indeed! Love, not fear, constrains him to obedience. – George Whitefield, quoted in Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the 18th Century Revival (2 vols; Banner of Truth, 1970, 1980), 1:407

C. S. Lewis on ‘Being in Love’ The trouble arises when poets and others set up this good thing as an absolute. Which many do. An innocent and well-intentioned emphasis on the importance of being-in-love with one’s spouse (i.e. its superiority over lust or ambition as a basis for marriage) is in fact widely twisted into the doctrine that only being-in-love sanctifies marriage and that therefore as soon as you are tired of your spouse you get a divorce.

Thus the overpraising of a finite good, the pretense that it is absolute, defeats itself and corrupts the very good it set out to exalt, reducing marriage to mere concubinage.

Treat ‘Love’ as a god and you in fact make it a fiend. –a 1942 letter to Daphne Harwood, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 511

Hebrews 2:18 If Christ never sinned, can he really sympathize fully with me in all my temptations? Nineteenth-century NT scholar B. F Westcott, commenting on Heb. 2:18, writes:

“Sympathy with the sinner in his trial does not depend on the experience of sin but on the experience of the strength of the temptation to sin which only the sinless can know in its full intensity. He who falls yields before the last strain.”- Brooke Foss Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews (1892), 59
In a 1943 letter, C. S. Lewis alludes to this comment by Westcott, and it seems that Westcott was the one to influence Lewis’ own similar but more well-known statement on temptation in Mere Christianity.

“It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man. . . . If this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore–on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certifying Him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.” – Dorothy Sayers, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World: A Selection of Essays (1969), 13

Paul Washer:
Relativism – A belief system based upon the absolute certainty that there are no absolutes.

Man will go to any extent to suppress the truth; even to the point of pretending that no such thing exists or that it cannot be known.

Paul knew that His Gospel would be rejected and ridiculed unless the Spirit intervened to move upon the hearts and minds of his hearers.

Man hates the truth because it exposes him for what he is and troubles what still remains of his conscience.

It is the great task of the Christian evangelist to both proclaim as a herald and expound as a scribe.
We hypocritically applaud men for seeking the truth, but call for the public execution of anyone arrogant enough to believe he has found it.