Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If the text is God's Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience.
The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.
We are dealing with God's thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.
A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross.
That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble.
...sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances, rather than change our circumstances.
Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers.
True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us
The Gospel itself is angular. It always has been. It always conflicts. It always challenges every generation. It challenges different generations in different ways.
The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.
Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.
We treat the Bible, not as if it's a magic book that has to be handled like a piece of abracadabra, make sure it's dusted, never put it on the floor, and things like that.
How much would our churches be transformed if each of us made it a practice to thank God for others and then to tell those others what it is about them that we thank God for?
The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.
Justice is not always done in this world; we see that everyday. But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying, "This isn't fair."
It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.
When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery. Will there also be faith? Yes, if our attention is focused more on the cross, and on the God of the cross, than on the suffering itself.
At the end of the day, in brief summary: inerrancy is interested in the truthfulness of Scripture and it is a powerful way forcing people to think about that reliability that is God-given.
The truth of the matter is that inerrancy is simply a way of saying that there are no errors that call into question the truthfulness of Scripture wherever Scripture is making truth claims.
Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It's not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture.
The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him.
One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most “evangelistic” movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.
I do think that there is a hunger in the land for a vision of confessional Christianity that is robust, God-centered, tough-minded, able to address today and tomorrow and the next day, and comprehensive.
God has disclosed of himself in human words with such magnificent self accommodation to our limitations. Precisely so that we may be his holy people and reverence everything that he says, cherish it, value it, and thus live it out.
The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God's story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible.
There needs to be a place in the church or just outside - there needs to be a place where people feel free to ask questions without being put upon, where they feel free to ask difficult, challenging questions to voice their skepticism.
In any Christian view of life, self-fulfillment must never be permitted to become the controlling issue. The issue is service, the service of real people. The question is, 'How can I be most useful?', not, 'How can I feel most useful?'
Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ
Not all Scripture is propositional, some of it is asking questions, some of it's rhetorical, but where Scripture is stating something, asserting something, making a truth claim, uttering a proposition that is claiming to be true, it is the truth.
We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb.
Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.
No one believes more strongly than I do that every Christian should be a theologian. In that sense, we all need to work it out. I want all Christians who can read, to read their Bibles and to read beyond the Bible - to read the history and theology.
Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.
Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. We do not drift into spiritual life; we do not drift into disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. That means we must self-consciousl y set aside time to do nothing but pray.
I can say that it's 10 miles from my home to Trinity, when in fact that's not quite right, it's off by about 10%, but nobody would say that I'm telling a lie or making a mistake when I rounded off because that's the way we speak and rounded off terms regularly.
In every generation there are voices that question the authority of Scripture. So in one sense this is merely part of the continuing stream. But there's a sense in which the questions that are raised against Scripture vary a wee bit from generation to generation.
So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things.
Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like.
It's not a matter of us standing outside it and ticking off the boxes: yes, the Bible is faithful here; yes, it's telling the truth there, and so on, but rather granted that it's God-given. It's the frame of reference that shows us how to live in, tells us how to think about everything.
The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin
Draw nigh to God, so that you may dread the grave as little as your bed. Draw nigh to God, that you may live a happy and useful life. Drawing nigh to God is the most concentrated energy of the soul. Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.
You get into theological education and you're busy marking papers and getting into administration in raising funds and doing all the things that are part of life, but here we were talking about important theological, historical, gospel related, biblically centered things hour after hour after hour.
A wrong understanding is interested in precisionism. That is it tries to say that the Bible can't be telling the truth if it says that Jesus was such and such a distance from some place or other and in fact the distance is off by 15% or something like that. There are all kinds of grounded figures and so forth.
Study Bibles tend to circulate widely, so they play a disproportionate role in helping Christians and others understand holy Scripture. Further, many of our members have long used one or two other Study Bibles, and it is important that Christians not be tied too tightly to only one option, however good it may be.
The important thing, Jesus is saying (in Matthew 5:33-37), is to tell the truth and keep one's pledges without insisting that a certain form of words must be used if it is to be binding. No oath is necessary for the truthful person... Their word is so reliable that nothing more than a statement is needed from them.
The broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity.
Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. This vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns
The New Testament writers I think conceive of their inspired Scripture writings as flushing out, bringing to articulation, expounding and so on the climactic revelation in the son, but this in self-conscious fulfillment of the promises and covenants that were already made to God's chosen people in Old Testament times.