Prayer is God's appointed means for appropriating the blessings that are ours in Christ Jesus.
The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.
If the text is God's Word it is appropriate that we respond with reverence a certain fear a holy joy a questing obedience.
What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence.
The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.
Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It's not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture.
The Gospel itself is angular. It always has been. It always conflicts. It always challenges every generation. It challenges different generations in different ways.
Some forms of absolutism are not bad; they may even be heroic.
The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.
There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
There is no long-range effective teaching of the Bible that is not accompanied by long hours of ongoing study of the Bible.
The way you lose the gospel is not by denying it but by assuming it.
To assume the gospel in one generation is to lose it in the next.
Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God not a technique for acquiring blessings.
If it is hard to accept a rebuke even a private one it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.
The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
We treat the Bible not as if it's a magic book that has to be handled like a piece of abracadabra make sure it's dusted never put it on the floor and things like that.
Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.
God's love in John 3:16 is not amazing because the world is so big but because the world is so bad.
A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross.
The aim is never to become a master of the Word but to be mastered by it.
Sin defies God utterly corrupts each individual corrodes all social relationships and issues in death.
...sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances rather than change our circumstances.
A billion years or so into eternity how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.
Effectiveness in teaching the Bible is purchased at the price of much study some of it lonely all of it tiring.
Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers.
The heart of all idolatry in the Bible is the de-godding of God.
At the end of the day in brief summary: inerrancy is interested in the truthfulness of Scripture and it is a powerful way forcing people to think about that reliability that is God-given.
You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.
Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
Love the church because Jesus loves it.
Good praying is more easily caught than taught.
Our prayers may be an index of how small and self-centered our world is.
Unchecked the new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains.
It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced.
Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God's love they cannot escape the cross.
The truth of the matter is that inerrancy is simply a way of saying that there are no errors that call into question the truthfulness of Scripture wherever Scripture is making truth claims.
The more clearly we see sins horror the more we shall treasure the cross.
That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble.
A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.
The Bible is not interested in precisionism unless the context indicates that precision is particularly important.
Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back.
Worship is the proper response of all moral sentient beings to God ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy delightfully so.
It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution out of love for his Father to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.
The New Testament writers did not invent a doctrine of Scripture they inherited it.
The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.
A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen.
We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray.
Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth not from want of evidence but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
Either worrying drives out prayer or prayer drives out worrying.
We are dealing with God's thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.
Despite the protestations one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rather than worship God.
To know God is to be transformed and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.
Damn all false dichotomies to hell
God is a talking God and thus you must come to wrestle with him. You must wrestle with what he said.
To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything but by experience.
Do you wish to see God's love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God's wrath? Look at the cross.
We are lost when human opinion means more to us than Godâ??s.
... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.
The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer.
Justice is not always done in this world; we see that everyday. But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying "This isn't fair.
All of us would be wiser if we would resolve never to put people down except on our prayer lists.
If you want to see what judgment looks like go to the cross. If you want to see what love looks like go to the cross.
The more we get to know God the more we want to know him better.
There is no sense in which Mohammed is viewed as a writer.
Sex is about timing. The world says: any time any place. God says: my time my place.
When we suffer there will sometimes be mystery... Will there also be faith?
How much would our churches be transformed if each of us made it a practice to thank God for others and then to tell those others what it is about them that we thank God for?
True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us
God is absolutely sovereign but his sovereignty never mitigates human responsibility.