โThe chief danger of the coming century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.โ
William Booth
โWhen God brings us to salvation, the most remarkable thing we see is that he transforms our hungers. He changes not just what we do but what we want to do. This is the work of the Holy Spirit within us โ โfor it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purposeโ (Philippians 2:13).โ
Ravi Zacharias, The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives
โOptimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse ‘in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God’s own commitment, that the best is yet to come.โ
J.I. Packer
โThe gospel is preached in the ears of all men; it only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher otherwise men would be converters of souls. Nor does it lie in the preacherโs learning; otherwise it could consists of the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it โ the Holy Ghost changing the will of man. O Sirs! We might as well preach to stone walls as preach to humanity unless the Holy Ghost be with the word, to give it power to convert the soul.โ
Charles H. Spurgeon
โMade for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world … That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us.โ
N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
โWe now demand glamour and fast-flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals…The tragic results of this spirit all all about us: shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies…the glorification of men, trust is religious externalities….salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such of these are the symptoms of an evil disease.โย
A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
โTo be really Bible-believing Christians we need to practice, simultaneously, at each step of the way, two biblical principles.
One principle is that of the purity of the visible church. Scripture commands that we must do more than just talk about the purity of the visible church; we must actually practice it, even when it is costly.
The second principle is that of an observable love among all true Christians. In the flesh we can stress purity without love, or we can stess love without purity; we cannot stress both simultaneously. To do so we must look moment by moment to the work of Christ and to the Holy Spirit. Without that, a stress on purity becomes hard, proud, and legalistic; likewise without it a stress on love becomes sheer compromise.
Spiritually begins to have real meaning in our lives as we begin to exhibit simultaneously the holiness of God and the love of God. We never do this perfectly, but we must look to the living Christ to help us do it truly.โ
Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster
Godโs providence is not in baskets lowered from the sky, but through the hands and hearts of those who love Him.ย The lad without food and without shoes made the proper answer to the cruel minded woman who asked, โBut if God loved you wouldnโt He send you food and shoes?โย The boy replied, โGod told someone, but he forgot.โ
George A. Buttrick
โI think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed itโHis Word. He alone has the power to change lives for eternity, and that power is focused on the Scriptures.โ
R.C. Sproul, The Prayer of the Lord
Here I sit in the middle of eternity.ย This wheelchair has helped me sit still.ย Iโve observed with curiosity the way we Christians grasp for the future, as if the present didnโt quite satisfy.ย How we, in spiritual fits and starts, scrape and scratch our way along, often missing the best of life while looking the other way, preoccupied with shaping our future.ย In my least consistent moments I too try to wrest the future out of his hands.ย Or worse, I sink back into the past and rest on long-ago laurelsย But God is most concerned with the choices I make now.ย God, standing silently and invisibly and presently with us in the middle of eternity, is interested in a certain kind of change.ย He brings us choices through which we never-endingly change, fresh and new into his likeness.
Joni Eareckson Tada
โChristian community is like the Christian’s sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.โ
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community
โAnd above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panellingโฆthe question should never be: โDo I like that kind of service?โ but โAre these doctrines true: Is holiness there? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to move to this door due to my pride, ormy mere taste, or my personal dislike for this particular door-keeper?โย
C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity
โWe are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.โ
Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God
โThe central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lordโs work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.โ
Francis A. Schaeffer –ย No Little People
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