“It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.” – A.W. Tozer

“Envy may be defined, or to the happiness of others considered as compared with their own. The thing to which envious persons are opposed is the comparative relation between that state of honor or happiness which others have, or may have, and their own state.” – Jonathan Edwards, sermon 5 in Charity and Its Fruits, in Works, Yale ed., 8:219

“Salvation is not verified by a past act, but by present fruitfulness.” – John MacArthur

“Grace puts its hand on the boasting mouth, and shuts it once for all.” – C.H. Spurgeon

“He who prays as he ought will endeavour to live as he prays.” – John Owen

“Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ’s sheep. The preacher’s job is to proclaim the faith, not to provide entertainment for unbelievers–in other words, to feed the sheep rather than amuse the goats” – J. I. Packer, A Quest For Godliness.

“Christ is the very essence of all delights and pleasures, the very soul and substance of them. As all the rivers are gathered into the ocean, which is the meeting-place of all the waters in the world, so Christ is that ocean in which all true delights and pleasures meet.” – John Flavel

“The issue is not why does God punish sin, but why does He permit the ongoing human rebellion? What prince, what king, what ruler would display so much patience with a continually rebellious populace? …We forget rather quickly that God’s patience is designed to lead us to repentance, to give us time to be redeemed…The supreme folly is that we think we will get away with our revolt.” – R.C. Sproul

“We are all by nature separate and far off from God. Sin, like a great barrier-wall, rises between us and our Maker. The sense of guilt makes us afraid of Him. The sense of His holiness keeps us at a distance from Him. Born with a heart at enmity with God, we become more and more alienated from Him, by practice, the longer we live. The very first questions in religion that must be answered, are these–”How can I draw near to God? How can I be justified? How can a sinner like me be reconciled to my Maker?” The Lord Jesus Christ has provided an answer to these mighty questions. By His sacrifice for us on the cross, He has opened a way through the great barrier, and provided pardon and peace for sinners.” – J.C. Ryle
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J. I. Packer:

“I think of the two pans of an old fashioned pair of scales. If one goes up, the other goes down.

Once upon a time folks new that God was great and that man by comparison was small. Each individual carried around a sense of his own smallness in the greatness of God’s world.

However, the scale pans are in a different relation today. Man has risen in his own estimation. He thinks of himself as great, grand and marvelously resourceful. This means inevitably that our thoughts about God have shrunk. As God goes down in our estimation, He gets smaller. He also exists now only for our pleasure, our convenience and our health, rather than we existing for His glory.

Now, I’m an old fashioned Christian and I believe that we exist for the glory of God. So the first thing I always want to do in any teaching of Christianity is to attempt to try and get those scale pans reversed. I want to try and show folks that God is the one of central importance. We exist for His praise, to worship Him, and find our joy and fulfillment in Him; therefore He must have all the glory. God is great and He must be acknowledged as great.

I think there is a tremendous difference between the view that God saves us and the idea that we save ourselves with God’s help. Formula number two fits the modern idea, while formula number one, as I read my Bible, is scriptural. We do not see salvation straight until we recognize that from first to last it is God’s work. He didn’t need to save us. He owed us nothing but damnation after we sinned. What he does, though, is to move in mercy. He sends us a Savior and His Holy Spirit into our hearts to bring us to faith in that Savior. Then He keeps us in that faith and brings us to His glory. It is His work from beginning to end. God saves sinners. It does, of course, put us down very low. It is that aspect of the gospel that presents the biggest challenge to the modern viewpoint. But we must not forget that it also sets God up very high. It reveals to us a God who is very great, very gracious and very glorious. A God who is certainly worthy of our worship.”

HT: JT

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” – Winston Churchill

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” – Winston Churchill

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln

“My people’s greatest need is for my own holiness.” – Robert Murray M’Cheyne

“Without Christ crucified in her pulpits, a Church is little better than a dead carcass, a well without water, a barren fig-tree, a sleeping watchman, a silent trumpet, a lighthouse without fire, a stumbling-block to weak believers, a comfort to unbelievers, a hot-bed for formalism, a joy to the devil, and an offence to God.” – J.C. Ryle

“Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance. It is laying hold of God’s willingness.” – George Mueller

“To touch the image of God is to touch God himself; to kill the image of God is to do violence to God himself.” – Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 16.

“Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.” – C.S. Lewis

“As creatures, we have no right or reason to expect that at every point we shall be able to comprehend the wisdom of our Creator.” – J.I. Packer

“Character is what we are when nobody sees us except God.” – John Blanchard

“To Satan no sight is beautiful but deformity itself, and no smell is sweet but filth and nastiness.” – John Calvin

“Did God not sometimes withhold in mercy what we ask, we should be ruined at our own request.” – Hannah More

“What have we time and strength for, but to lay out both for God? What is a candle made for, but to burn?” – Richard Baxter

“The gospel of justification by faith is such a shocker, such an explosion, because it is an absolutely unconditional promise. It is not an “if-then” kind of statement, but “because-therefore” pronouncement: because Jesus died and rose, your sins are forgiven and you are righteous in the sight of God! It bursts in upon our little world all shut up and barricaded behind our accustomed conditional thinking as some strange comet from goodness-knows-where, something we can’t really seem to wrap our minds around, the logic of which appears closed to us. How can it be entirely unconditional? Isn’t it terribly dangerous? How can anyone say flat out, “You are righteous for Jesus’ sake? Is there not some price to be paid, some-thing (however minuscule) to be done? After all, there can’t be such thing as a free lunch, can there?”

You see, we really are sealed up in the prison of our conditional thinking. It is terribly difficult for us to get out, and even if someone batters down the door and shatters the bars, chances are we will stay in the prison anyway! We seem always to want to hold out for something somehow, that little bit of something, and we do it with a passion and an anxiety that betrays its true source–the Old Adam that just does not want to lose control.” – Gerhard Forde, Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life, pg. 24 Continue reading →