How to Know God

“Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.”- Blaise Pascal

The Kind of Preachers We Need

“Yea…that we shall see the great Head of the Church once more . . . raise up unto Himself certain young men whom He may use in this glorious employ. And what manner of men will they be? Men mighty in the Scriptures, their lives dominated by a sense of the greatness, the majesty and holiness of God, and their minds and hearts aglow with the great truths of the doctrines of grace. They will be men who have learned what it is to die to self, to human aims and personal ambitions; men who are willing to be ‘fools for Christ’s sake’, who will bear reproach and falsehood, who will labor and suffer, and whose supreme desire will be, not to gain earth’s accolades, but to win the Master’s approbation when they appear before His awesome judgment seat. They will be men who will preach with broken hearts and tear-filled eyes, and upon whose ministries God will grant an extraordinary effusion of the Holy Spirit, and who will witness ‘signs and wonders following’ in the transformation of multitudes of human lives.”  ~George Whitefield

Theology or Expediency

“When churches abandon or de-emphasize theology, they give up the intellectual tools by which the Christian message can be articulated and defended.  In the resulting chaos of religious ideas, the principal criterion left to the community as it seeks to find its way is, quite naturally, that of expediency.”  ~Peter Berger

Salvation is an Event

“Salvation, according to the Bible, is not something that was discovered, but something that happened. Hence appears the uniqueness of the Bible.  All the ideas of Christianity might be discovered in some other religion, yet there would be in that other religion no Christianity.  For Christianity depends, not upon  complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event.  Without that event, the world, in the Christian view, is altogether dark, and humanity is lost under the guilt of sin.  There can be no salvation by the discovery of eternal truth, for eternal truth brings naught but despair, because of sin.  But a new face has been put upon lifeby the blessed thing that God did when he offered up His only begotten Son.” ~J. Grecham Machen

Virtuous Sins

“It is in our virtuous behavior that we are liable to the gravest sins. It is while we are being good that we have the chance of being really bad.  It is in this context of being responsible, being obedient, that we most easily substitute our will for God’s will, because it is so easy to suppose that they are identical. “ ~Eugene Peterson 

Results of Worship

“You become like what you worship.  When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.  Those who worship money become human calculating machines.  Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness or prowess.  Those who worship power become more and more ruthless.  So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain?…Because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.”  –N. T. Wright

Fully Alive

“For many today, God seems an enemy of human flourishing. Yet, in the Christian tradition, God is portrayed as a lover of creation–so much so that the early church father Irenaeus could say, ‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive.’ While critical appraisal of malfunctions of faith are crucial, we must go beyond the critical moment to discover afresh today how and why God matters for human flourishing.” –Miroslav Volf

The Christian Counter-Culture

For the past couple weeks I have been preparing a series in the Sermon on the Mount.  I am finding John Stott to be very helpful in my preparation.  Here is Stott’s explanation of the SOTM’s purpose: ”The followers of Jesus are to be different–different from both the nominal church and the secular world, different from both the religious and irreligious.  The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete delineation anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian counter-culture. Here is a Christian value-system, ethical standard, religious devotion, attitude to money, ambition, life-style and network of relationships–all of which are totally at variance with those of the non-Christian world.  And this Christian counter-culture is the life of the kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule.” –John Stott 

Easter Quote

“The question of Jesus’ resurrection, though it may in some senses burst the bounds of history, also remains within them; that is precisely why it is so important, so disturbing, so life-and-death.  We could cope–the world could cope–with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples’ minds and hearts.  The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God’s new creation right in the middle of the old one.”  

–N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope 

Welcome

Me at my usual post.