You should be ashamed if this is true of you

“I just spent an evening about a month ago with very close friends of mine who are Mormons. We had a very interesting conversation as we always do when it comes back around to the Gospel, and my friend’s wife said, ‘You know, I just don’t know all the debates between these different churches and denominations … I know evangelicals in town; our kids play together … I’ve even been to their churches a few times … There’s nothing different … My kids wear the bracelet [WWJD] … Look up there on the wall: There’s a picture of Jesus. We teach our children every day who Jesus is and the teachings that Jesus gave us to follow. As long as our children are being taught to follow Jesus, what’s all this division over doctrine?’”

— Mike Horton

Two motions

At the risk of 2 Doug Wilson quotes in a row, I offer this:

The unregenerate heart has only two motions it can make -- that of trying to climb to God on its own, or trying to run away from God.

The unregenerate heart can understand the holiness of God and flee from Him, or misunderstand it, and try to attain to it on its own. Only the converted heart can see the holiness as gladness, and the gladness as righteousness, and the righteousness as glory, and love all of it. As John Piper has argued concerning 1 Tim. 1:11, we have to have our eyes opened so that we see the gospel of the glory of the gladness of God. Would this really resolve all these issues? Taste and see.

— Doug Wilson

Far worse

As I periodically tell people in counseling, there is no problem you might have that you can't, by diligent effort, make far worse.

—Doug Wilson

The End

Regarding the death and end of Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse magazine, Albert Mohler said

You will no doubt hear many Christians who are going to be tempted to say they would not want to be Bob Guccione on the day of judgement. Well, that is certainly true, but in truth every single sinner who does not come to know salvation in Jesus Christ is going to face the full justice and judgement of God. On that day, Bob Guccione will not stand out from the mass of sinners, because every single sinner will be seen with his or her sin fully exposed.

What we see in the death of Bob Guccione is another signal of the fact that human sinfulness is just as ugly as we must know it to be.

Offensive line in the sand

Once again, 120 years ago, Charles Spurgeon said something yesterday.

Privacy

There is nothing hidden from the Lord’s eyes. There are no secrets with Him. Alone or in company, by night or by day, in private or in public, He is acquainted with all our ways. He who saw Nathanael under the fig-tree is unchanged. Go where we will, and retire from the world as we may, we are never out of sight of Christ.

— J.C. Ryle

Ultimate trust

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.

— Thomas Sowell

What is this message?

[I]ngredients of preaching and teaching that we might want to link with the gospel would include the need for the gospel (sin and judgment), the means of receiving the benefits of the gospel (faith and repentance), the results or fruit of the gospel (regeneration, conversion, sanctification, glorification) and the results of rejecting it (wrath, judgment, hell). These, however we define and proclaim them, are not in themselves the gospel. If something is not what God did in and through the historical Jesus two thousand years ago, it is not the gospel. Thus Christians cannot ‘live the gospel’, as they are often exhorted to do. They can only believe it, proclaim it and seek to live consistently with it. Only Jesus lived (and died) the gospel. It is a once-for-all finished and perfect event done for us by another.

— Graeme Goldsworthy

More than a teacher

Preaching about Mark 10:1–12:

Jesus was more than a teacher. Did you notice that in our passage? Even up there in verse 3. You know when the Pharisees asked him the question, look at what He said: “ ‘What did Moses command you?’ He replied.” Veeery interesting. Not us like the humble good rabbi should say, but you, as if Moses never commanded Jesus anything.

And even more so when you look again at verse 5 and you think about it for a minute. “ ‘It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,’ Jesus replied.” You see what Jesus is doing there? It is something unheard of for a rabbi to be doing. Jesus is speaking of the motive behind God's law that Moses gave. Huh! Okay, how could he do that? That seems … hmm … Maybe there's a verse in Deuteronomy I didn't know about where God says this. Yeah, you read through all of Deuteronomy, all of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, you won't find any verse like that. How could Jesus claim something like this with a straight face --- unless he was, himself, claiming to know the mind of God, because he was claiming, himself, to be God?

— Mark Dever

Re: suffering

With reference to Romans 8:22:

If you're in the hospital and you hear a scream across the hall, it makes a huge difference whether you know you're in the maternity unit or the oncology unit. [For those who trust in Christ,] [a]ll of your sufferings, including your death, [are] birth pangs.

— John Piper

A sinner

Every minister is a sinner also, and every minister needs to know what it is like to preach to himself as well as to others. But regardless of whether the minister is also in the congregation, the message he preaches is to be found in the text, and not in his own panicked fear or sense of envy.

— Doug Wilson

Elegance

Reviewing The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins, Tim Challies wrote this:

A scientist can conjure up in his mind ways of describing the world without God, but he has a lot more trouble explaining it. Design seems to scream for a designer, elegance for agency.

— Tim Challies

Happiness

Our effort to create our own happiness is just about as successful as our effort to create our own righteousness: It's pretty much a “crash and burn.”

— R. Albert Mohler

The Old Testament

Over the years, [the trend among Christian scholars] has been toward a study of the Old Testament in and of itself. This is not a Christian approach to the matter. Christians in increasing numbers have written books on the Old Testament which hardly even mention the fact that the New Testament exists. […] As Christians, we must return to the priciples of Old Testament interpretation dictated by the New Testament.

— Graeme Goldsworthy

I believe this is true. But I wonder how much we have it backward. As a couple of examples:

• Do we expect the culture we live in to conform to the Old Testament law, i.e., to encode and enforce it as law?
• Have we grown to believe that the promises made in the Old Testament to national Israel continue to the present day nation-state of Israel? Then what's the meaning of Acts 2:30–31, Acts 13:16–33, Galatians 3:15–29, Ephesians 2:14?

The Secret

“The Christian's secret of a happy life is to know about the hope, not merely something subjective, not merely something that happens in the realm of my own feelings or states or moods.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

In the current election

“There is no message in the New Testament for the lost except to tell them that they are lost, that they are under condemnation, that they are under the wrath of God, and that unless they repent they remain lost and will be lost to all eternity. This is what I want to emphasize, that the New Testament has nothing to say to the world this morning except that — nothing whatsoever. Our only message to those who are in the world is to repent and to believe the Gospel — nothing else. There is no further interest taken.

“If a man does not repent and believe the Gospel, well he remains where he is, and the Gospel has nothing further to say to him. There is no hope for the world outside Christ — none whatsoever. There is no improvement predicted or prophesied for the world — none whatsoever.

“There is no greater error or heresy than to think that it is the business of Christian preaching to improve the world somewhat. It's a denial of the Gospel. I am using my language advisedly and soberly. The idea that it is the business of the church to recommend Christian principles to the world and plead with it and ask it to put [them] into practice, to send messages to statesmen and ask them to put [them] into practice, I say, is a denial of [the Gospel].

“The only message of the Gospel to the world is to tell it to repent because it's under the wrath of God, and that unless it repents it's lost, and lost eternally.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Happiness and eternity

“Friend, if your kind of Christianity makes sense even if there's nothing after the grave, then you've gotten hold of a false product. The kind of Christianity that the Bible talks about and that we are calling you to will not all add up to necessarily what's considered a better life on this side of the grave. Because we believe in those eternal realities, and we live for them for Christ, so it is that we Christians are happy under any circumstances in this world — as Habbakuk said, even if our resources are entirely spent — as long as we have God, because God is our strength and our hope.”

— Mark Dever

Sheep and Goats

At the beginning of [the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25] the sheep and the goats are separated by what they are, and only Christ can take a goat and turn that person into a sheep. We don't have the ability to change ourselves from goats into sheep, and the transformation takes place when Christ gives us faith through the proclamation of the Gospel. So salvation is a gift from beginning to end. The sheep aren't even aware of the good works that they have done.

— Chris Rosebrough

Legalism

Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from God and acceptance by God through obedience to God.

— C.J. Mahaney

God's will among men

Before the Civil War, before his presidency, Abraham Lincoln was known to be a scoffer toward Christianity. I have read elsewhere that when Lincoln went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to deliver his most famous address, his commitment to Christ was cemented. It was about the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, over a year before the Gettysburg Address, that a change began to come over him. Below is a brief meditation by Lincoln, written around the time of the Proclamation. I am posting it here because it reveals a maturity in thinking about the will of God that is rarely heard.

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.