ICR Science Writer

“What a wonder is it, that two natures infinitely distant, should be more intimately united than anything in the world; and yet without any confusion! That the same person should have both a glory and a grief; an infinite joy in the Deity, and an inexpressible sorrow in the humanity! That a God upon a throne should be an infant in a cradle; the thundering Creator be a weeping babe and a suffering man, are such expressions of mighty power, as well as condescending love, that they astonish men upon earth, and angels in heaven.” – Thomas Goodwin

“In this union between the two natures there is the greatest distance involved. The creator is identified with a creature. In the union of the two natures one sees eternity and temporality, eternal blessedness and temporal sorrow, Almightiness and weakness, omniscience and ignorance, unchangeableness and changeableness, infinity and finitude. All of these disparate attributes come together in the person of Jesus Christ.” – Mark Jones

“Unbelief is like gravity, it’s always pulling down on the authority of Scripture.” – Mark Dever

“We cannot find God without God. We cannot reach God without God. We cannot satisfy God without God – which is another way of saying that all our seeking will fall short unless God starts and finishes the search. The decisive part of our seeking is not our human ascent to God, but His descent to us. Without God’s descent there is no human ascent. The secret of the quest lies not in our brilliance but in His grace.” – Os Guinness, Long Journey Home

“We are cosmic traitors. We must recognize this problem within ourselves if we are to grasp the necessity of the cross.” – R.C. Sproul

“The great Master Gardener, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in a wonderful providence, with his own hand, planted me here, where by his grace, in this part of his vineyard, I grow; and here I will abide till the great Master of the vineyard think fit to transplant me.” – Samuel Rutherford

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

“Faith and repentance are as much benefits of the covenant of grace as justification . . . . faith and repentance themselves . . . . are components of the gospel, not the workings or fruits of the law.” – Herman Bavinck

“God gives the grace of forgiveness in order to receive the glory of worship.” – Rhett Dodson

“People fall in private, long before they fall in public.” – J.C. Ryle

“He whose head is in heaven need not fear to put his feet into the grave.” – Matthew Henry

“Did Christ finish His work for us? Then there can be no doubt but He will also finish His work in us.” – John Flavel

“Truth is never determined by majority opinion, but by divine revelation.” – Steve Lawson

“If the cross is not foolishness to the lost world then we have misrepresented the cross.” – Steven Lawson

“Preaching on unity doesn’t unify a church. Preaching Jesus unifies a church.” – Steve Dighton

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely the little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at any point.” – Martin Luther

“They gave our Master a crown of thorns. Why do we hope for a crown of roses?” – Martin Luther

“…even acts of civic kindness done by an unbeliever fail to meet the requirement of God’s law—namely, that all our actions must be done with a view to glorifying God.” – Derek Thomas

“At the end of the day, the biggest obstacle to evangelism is Christians who don’t share the gospel.” – Albert Mohler

“Ho, Ho, Sir Surgeon. You are too delicate to tell the man that he is ill. You hope to heal the sick without their knowing it. You therefore flatter them. And what happens? They laugh at you. They dance upon their own graves and at last they die. Your delicacy is cruelty, your flatteries are poisons, you are a murderer… Shall we keep men in a fool’s paradise? Shall we lull them into soft slumber from which they will awake in hell? Are we to become helpers of their damnation by our smooth speeches? In the name of God we will not.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“I used to say ‘he needs a radical conversion.’ Now I say, ‘a true conversion is radical.'” – Linda Samson

“The Epistle to the Romans has sat around in the church since the first century like a bomb ticking away the death of religion; and every time it’s been picked up, the ear-splitting freedom in it has gone off with a roar. The only sad thing is that the church as an institution has spent most of its time playing bomb squad and trying to defuse it. For your comfort, though, it can’t be done. Your freedom remains as close to your life as Jesus and as available to your understanding as the nearest copy. Like Augustine, therefore, take and read–and then hold onto your hat. Compared to that explosion, the clap of doom sounds like a cap pistol.” – Robert Capon

“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” – C. S. Lewis

“The world was created that from thence Christ might obtain his spouse.” – Jonathan Edwards

“The love of Jesus Christ constrains me to lift up my voice like a trumpet. My heart is now full; out of the abundance of the love which I have for your precious and immortal souls, my mouth now speaks; and I could now not only continue my discourse until midnight, but I could speak until I could speak no more.” – George Whitefield

“We never get past the gospel.” – Derek Thomas

“The true church is too different for the world to tolerate it.” – Sinclair Ferguson

“No man who is full of himself can ever truly preach the Christ who emptied himself.” – J. Sidlow Baxter

“God’s grace in saving miserable sinners has been replaced by heretical teaching, such as saying that it is because we are so valuable that Christ came to redeem us. Not all who hold self-esteem views go so far, but many do.” – Jay Adams

“As a husband, your love for your wife has a specific goal: her holiness.” – Winston Smith

“George Whitefield was convinced that any presentation of the gospel must begin by exposing the listener’s sin and his dire need for salvation.” – Steven Lawson

“The first thing the sinner needs is life. He cannot ask for life, for he is dead. God gives him life, and he proves that he has it by believing the gospel. Quickening is the first step. It is the first thing that happens. I do not ask to be quickened. If I asked to be quickened I would not need to be quickened. I would already have life.” – Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Ephesians – God’s Way Of Reconciliation)

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“If you’re a beast in the pulpit but a coward in your neighborhood, something has gone wrong.” – Matt Chandler

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T. S. Eliot

“The grace of God has no charms for men till the Holy Spirit gives them a taste for it.” – John Calvin

“God is dependable. His predestination cannot fail, and no one can withstand Him.” – Martin Luther

“There are no easy steps to witnessing! No painless, thinking about Him, boasting of Him, speaking about and for and to Him, thrilled and entranced with His perfections and beauty, finding ways to serve and exalt Him, tirelessly exploring ways to spend and be spent for Him, growing in character to be more and more like Him – and I will show you a person who IS filled with the Holy Spirit. We should learn what the Bible says about the Holy Spirit. We should teach what the Bible says about the Holy Spirit. We should seek to live lives full of the biblically defined ministry of the Holy Spirit. But we should never lose sight of this: To the degree that we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we will be targeted on, focused on, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.” – Dan Phillips

“When a believer has fallen into a low, sad state of feeling, he often tries to lift himself out of it by chastening himself with dark and doleful fears. Such is not the way to rise from the dust, but to continue in it. As well chain the eagle’s wing to make it mount, as doubt in order to increase our grace. It is not the law, but the gospel which saves the seeking soul at first; and it is not a legal bondage, but gospel liberty which can restore the fainting believer afterwards. Slavish fear brings not back the backslider to God, but the sweet wooings of love allure him to Jesus’ bosom.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“The apostle says that Rock was Christ, 1 Cor. 10:4, it was a type of him. While the curse of God might justly have been executed upon our guilty souls, behold the Son of God is smitten for us. Let us ask and receive. There was a constant, abundant supply of this water. Numerous as believers are, the supply of the Spirit of Christ is enough for all. The water flowed from the rock in streams to refresh the wilderness, and attended them on their way towards Canaan; and this water flows from Christ, through the ordinances, in the barren wilderness of this world, to refresh our souls, until we come to glory.” – Matthew Henry

“Sooner could a fish live upon a tree than the wicked in Paradise.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“The doctrines of grace humble a man without degrading him and exalt a man without inflating him.” – Charles Hodge

“I will not believe that you have tasted of the honey of the gospel if you can eat it all by yourself.” – C. H. Spurgeon

Paraphrasing the Puritan, John Owen from his book, A Treatise of the Dominion of Sin and Grace, Sinclair Ferguson says,

There are actually only ever two pastoral problems you will ever encounter. The first is this: persuading those who are under the dominion of sin that they are under the dominion of sin. That’s the task of evangelism. And [second], persuading those who are no longer under the dominion of sin that they are no longer under the dominion of sin because they’re Christ’s.

“Effective executives know that they have to get many things done — and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate — their own time and energy as well as that of their organization — on doing one thing at a time, and on doing first things first.” – Peter Drucker

“If God does not meddle with your free will, you will free will your way to hell.” – John Samson

“God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.” – J.I. Packer

“Humility is not simply feeling small and useless – like an inferiority complex. It is sensing how great and glorious God is, and seeing myself in that light.” – Sinclair Ferguson

“We are plainly taught in the Word of God that as many as have believed are one with Christ: they are married to him, there is a conjugal union based upon mutual affection. The union is closer still, for there is a vital union between Christ and his saints. They are in him as the branches are in the vine; they are members of the body of which he is the head. They are one with Jesus in such a true and real sense that with him they died, with him they have been buried, with him they are raised; with him they are raised up together and made to sit together in heavenly places. There is an indissoluble union between Christ and all his people: I in them and they in me.

Thus the union may be described: “Christ is in his people the hope of glory, and they are dead and their life is hid with Christ in God. This is a union of the most wonderful kind, which figures may faintly set forth, but which it is impossible for language completely to explain.

Oneness to Jesus is one of the fat things full of marrow. For if it be so, indeed, that we are one with Christ, then because he lives we must live also; because he was justified by his resurrection, we also are justified in him; because he is rewarded and forever sits down at his Father’s right hand, we also have obtained the inheritance in him and by faith grasp it now and enjoy its earnest.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“Not all that seem to be branches are branches of the true Vine. Many branches fall off the trees when the high winds begin to blow—all that are rotten branches. So, in times of temptation, or trial, or persecution, many false professors drop away. Many that seemed to be believers went back, and walked no more with Jesus. They followed Jesus, they prayed with Him, they praised Him; but they went back, and walked no more with Him. So it is still. Many among us doubtless seem to be converted; they begin well and promise fair, who will fall off when winter comes. Some have fallen off, I fear, already; some more may be expected to follow. These will not be blessed in dying. Oh, of all deathbeds may I be kept from beholding the deathbed of the false professor! I have seen it before now, and I trust I may never see it again. They are not blessed after death. The rotten branches will burn more fiercely in the flames.Oh, think what torment it will be, to think that you spent your life in pretending to be a Christian, and lost your opportunity of becoming one indeed! Your hell will be all the deeper, blacker, hotter, that you knew so much of Christ, and were so near Him, and found Him not.” – Robert Murray McCheyne

“The spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous; she is uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home; she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church and is joined to an adulteress, is separated from the promises of the Church; nor can he who forsakes the Church of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.” – Cyprian, Treatise on the Unity of the Church, 6.

“After our preaching of the law rightly pushes people under water, we all too often lead them to think that they must “save” themselves by giving them swimming lessons: ‘Paddle harder, kick faster.’ I want the last word I speak over Christians when I preach to be the last word God speaks over Christians – ‘Paid in full.’ The Gospel always has the last word over a believer. Always. When it’s all said and done there are two types of sermons: Jesus + Nothing = Everything or Jesus + Something = Everything. May God raise up a generation of bold preachers who storm the gates of works-righteousness in all its forms with nothing more and nothing less than, “In my place condemned he stood, and sealed my pardon with his blood. Hallelujah, what a Savior.'” – Tullian Tchividjian

“The trouble with all false evangelism is that it does not start with doctrine, it does not start by realising man’s condition… If you and I realised that every man who is yet a sinner is absolutely dominated by the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, if we only understood that he is really a child of wrath and dead in trespasses and sins, we would realise that only one power can deal with such an individual, and that is the power of God, the power of the Holy Spirit. And so we would put our confidence, not in man-made organisations, but in the power of God, in the prayer that holds on to God and asks for revival and a descent of the Spirit. We would realise that nothing else can do it. We can change men superficially, we can win men to our side and to our party, we can persuade them to join a church, but we can never raise the spiritually dead; God alone can do that.” – Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Ephesians – God’s Way Of Reconciliation)

“You are always on duty in the Christian life, you can never relax. There is no such thing as a holiday in the spiritual realm.” – Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.” – G.K. Chesterton