"The sinful life is always an unreasonable life. Sin is always something that is based upon passion. Sin can give no explanation of what it does." (pg. 18)
"...the most powerful of all the arguments for the reality of God is the fact of the persistence of the Christian church." (pg. 51)
"It is only in the light of the law, which reveals the holy nature of God, that man can see himself as a sinner; that man really begins to understand the nature of this foul canker that is inbred into his being, and that has marred the image of God, and brought chaos into the universe." (pg. 76)
"With all our self-centeredness in recent years we have always been waiting for something which will make us happier or more comfortable. Yet the word of God is a word about God. It is because of this morbidity and introspection that we lose sight of the great authority of the Christian faith. In our concern about men, we have been forgetting God." (pg. 96)
It is something which is almost incredible and astounding that, having our Bibles as we have them, after having read them so often, nevertheless when we are suddenly questioned or question ourselves about these matters, how prone we are to apply tests that are never put in the forefront of the New Testament, but which are the tests put by the man in the street in order to determine what is a Christian or what is not a Christian." (pg. 124)
"Beyond doubt one of the best ways of testing whether we love God is to test our feelings and attitude towards Him when we have sinned against Him." (pg. 133)
"The reason for being holy is not that we may be happy; there is only one reason for being holy and that is that it is God's will for me. It is God's purpose for me. It is God's desire for me." (pg. 141)
"Enthusiasm in connection with religion has been at a very serious discount. Our idea of the general standard to adopt is to display no emotion, or fervency of spirit in relation to any matter. We have rather cultivated a philosophical calm and detachment, and the result is, of course, that in our actions and activities we have become more or less paralysed and slow moving." (pg. 219ff)
"Nothing to me is of such significance as the increasing realization that without a given body of doctrine, without a fresh study of Christian theology, there can be no true revival in the church." (pg. 243)
"There is nothing that so drives and urges a man to live a truly ethical, moral, Christian life as an understanding of the doctrines of the faith." (pg. 244)
"However much strength and courage and manliness I may possess, if it is not in terms of faith, it is useless and valueless from the Christian standpoint." (pg. 250)
"Christian people far too often rush after new cults and lop-sided gospels and fail to stand four-square in the faith itself. There is only one way to avoid being carried to and fro like a bubble on the surface of the waves and that is by being strong as the result of studying and understanding the truth; by developing a knowledge of biblical theology, by reading, by developing a knowledge of what has been written by the great saints of the past in the interpretation of the word of God." (pg. 254)
"If the Christian church were doing nothing else at the present time, she could justify her existence by simply saying this, that there are ultimately just these two views with respect to life. You either face it with God, or else you do not." (pg. 272)
Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (edited by Dr. Michael Eaton), The Christian In An Age Of Terror (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications)
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement - by J. I. Packer & Mark Dever
"Just justification - justified justification - through the doing of justice in penal substitution is integral to the message of the gospel." (pg. 24)
"The wrath of God is as personal, and as potent, as his love; and, just as the blood-shedding of the Lord Jesus was the direct manifesting of his Father's love toward us, so it was the direct averting of his Father's wrath against us." (pg. 35)
"The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this: that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of His wrath. It was Christ's so to deal with the wrath that the loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God's good pleasure." (pg. 36)
"Our sins have been punished; the wheel of retribution has turned; judgment has been inflicted for our ungodliness - but on Jesus, the lamb of God, standing in our place." (pg. 40)
"The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us." (pg. 49)
"Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of God's ways, but the remission of my sins; and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that, on the one hand, no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise, and, on the other hand, that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus, who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty that was my due." (pg. 79)
"The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method that makes man the standard for God; to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us, even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word 'supernatural' in theology); and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it." (pg. 89)
"If we have any assurance of salvation, it is because of Christ's atonement; if any joy, it flows from Christ's work on the cross. The atonement protects us from our native tendency to replace religion with morality and God's grace with legalism. Apart from Christ's atoning work, we would be forever guilty, ashamed, and condemned before God." (pg. 102)
"One way of stating the difference between it [today's substitute gospel] and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be 'helpful' to man - to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction - and too little concerned to glorify God." (pg. 112)
"The knowledge of being the object of God's eternal love and Christ's redeeming death belongs to the individual's assurance, which in the nature of the case cannot precede faith's saving exercise; it is to be inferred from the fact that one has believed, not proposed as a reason why one should believe." (pg. 131)
"The wrath of God is as personal, and as potent, as his love; and, just as the blood-shedding of the Lord Jesus was the direct manifesting of his Father's love toward us, so it was the direct averting of his Father's wrath against us." (pg. 35)
"The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this: that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of His wrath. It was Christ's so to deal with the wrath that the loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God's good pleasure." (pg. 36)
"Our sins have been punished; the wheel of retribution has turned; judgment has been inflicted for our ungodliness - but on Jesus, the lamb of God, standing in our place." (pg. 40)
"The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us." (pg. 49)
"Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of God's ways, but the remission of my sins; and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that, on the one hand, no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise, and, on the other hand, that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus, who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty that was my due." (pg. 79)
"The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method that makes man the standard for God; to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us, even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word 'supernatural' in theology); and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it." (pg. 89)
"If we have any assurance of salvation, it is because of Christ's atonement; if any joy, it flows from Christ's work on the cross. The atonement protects us from our native tendency to replace religion with morality and God's grace with legalism. Apart from Christ's atoning work, we would be forever guilty, ashamed, and condemned before God." (pg. 102)
"One way of stating the difference between it [today's substitute gospel] and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be 'helpful' to man - to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction - and too little concerned to glorify God." (pg. 112)
"The knowledge of being the object of God's eternal love and Christ's redeeming death belongs to the individual's assurance, which in the nature of the case cannot precede faith's saving exercise; it is to be inferred from the fact that one has believed, not proposed as a reason why one should believe." (pg. 131)
"The cross on which the divine-human mediator hung, and from which he rose to reign on the basis and in the power of his atoning death, must become the vantage point from which we survey the whole of human history and human life, the reference point for explaining all that has gone wrong in the world everywhere and all that God has done and will do to put it right, and the center point for fixing the flow of doxology and devotion from our hearts." (pg. 148ff)
J. I. Packer & Mark Dever, In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2007)
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