Quotes

There is nothing greater in the life of the church than to see men and women, temperamentally and constitutionally weak and fragile, enabled to endure what would make strong men quake: able to be patient in affliction, content whatever their circumstances, and making melody in their hearts always and in all things (Ephesians 5:20). That is the acme of Christian achievement and one of the most moving accomplishments of omnipotence.

— Donald Macleod, Behold Your God (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 1990), pp. 57-58

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

— Miguel Cervantes

Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man could take his life on it a thousand times.

— Martin Luther

Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensee 174

All heretical dogmas are partial truths — true in what they assert, false in what they deny or ignore.

— A. A. Hodge, Evangelical Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1976 [1890])

Apostasy is the total and complete denial of the Christian faith. Heresy is more like the wolf in sheep’s clothing. It nearly always is a distortion of the revelatory witness, maintaining an appearance of the truth while undercutting its meaning. Heresy distorts, re-interprets to the point of contradiction, or over-emphasizes one aspect of the mosaic to the point of reducing the faith to one dimension of it. Heresy is a caricature of the revealed faith.

— Stanley S Harakas, Doing theology today: an Orthodox and evangelical dialogue on theological method. Pro Ecclesia. Fall 2002. 11 (4):435-462.

The Bible is God’s syllabus for the human race; it is his educational agenda for us.

— Peter Adam, Written for Us: Receiving God’s Words in the Bible (Nottingham: IVP), p. 68

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Powerful preaching penetrates more than the surface of the mind; it does more than merely present teaching; it is capable of causing a moral and emotional earthquake–‘not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction’ (1 Thess. 1:4).

— Iain H. Murray, Lloyd-Jones: Messenger of Grace (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2008)

“[I]t is better for [people] to find you [O God] and leave the question unanswered than to find the answer without finding you.”

Preaching . . . is not soundbite; it is not polished rhetoric; its effect does not rest on the irresistible logic of the preacher’s argumentation, but on the irresistible grace of the preacher’s God.

The faith that fizzles before the finish had a flaw at the first.

— Steve Lawson, Seminar “Faith and Works in Justification: A Consideration of Paul and James”, Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in Philadelphia, 2 May 2009

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

Worry is interest paid on a debt we may never owe.

There is no such thing as “spirituality.” Doesn’t exist, has no meaning. It’s just a name for “doing what I want to do and feeling that the universe somehow smiles on me for doing it.

Trivia becomes drama in a disoriented age.

I preach as though Christ was crucified yesterday, rose from the dead today and was coming back tomorrow.

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