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Sexual laxity does not make you more human, but less so; it brutalizes you and tears your soul to pieces. The same is true wherever any of God’s commandments are disregarded. We are only living truly human lives just so far as we are laboring to keep God’s commandments; no further.
True Christians are people who acknowledge and live under the word of God.
Why does this description fit so few of us who profess to be Christians in these days? You will find it profitable to ask your conscience, and let it tell you.
To know God’s love is indeed heaven on earth.
With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, nonuniversal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones. Thus, we show a great deal more interest in the gifts of healing and tongues—gifts of which, as Paul pointed out, not all Christians are meant to partake anyway (1 Cor 12:28-30)—than in the Spirit’s ordinary work of giving peace, joy, hope and love, through the shedding abroad in our hearts of knowledge of the love of God. Yet the latter is much more important than the former.
“God is love” is not the complete truth about God so far as the Bible is concerned.
So the love of the God who is spirit is no fitful, fluctuating thing, as human love is, nor is it a mere impotent longing for things that may never be; it is, rather, a spontaneous determination of God’s whole being in an attitude of benevolence and benefaction, an attitude freely chosen and firmly fixed. There are no inconstancies or vicissitudes in the love of the almighty God who is spirit.
The God whom Jesus made known is not a God who is indifferent to moral distinctions, but a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, a God whose ideal for his children is that they should “be perfect . . . as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).
God’s love is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners whereby, having identified himself with their welfare, he has given his Son to be their Savior, and now brings them to know and enjoy him in a covenant relation.
Goodness in God, writes Berkhof, is “that perfection in God which prompts him to deal bountifully and kindly with all His creatures. It is the affection which the Creator feels towards His sentient creatures as such”
“Love, generally,” wrote James Orr, “is that principle which leads one moral being to desire and delight in another, and reaches its highest form in that personal fellowship in which each lives in the life of the other, and finds his joy in imparting himself to the other, and in receiving back the outflow of that other’s affection unto himself”
the New Testament writers had to introduce what was virtually a new Greek word, agapē, to express the love of God as they knew it.
we know that those who truly love are only happy when those whom they love are truly happy also.
God’s end in all things is his own glory—that he should be manifested, known, admired, adored. This statement is true, but it is incomplete. It needs to be balanced by a recognition that through setting his love on human beings God has voluntarily bound up his own final happiness with theirs.
Thus God saves, not only for his glory, but also for his gladness.
My grace, saith God, shall be yours to pardon you, and my power shall be yours to protect you, and my wisdom shall be yours to direct you, and my goodness shall be yours to relieve you, and my mercy shall be yours to supply you, and my glory shall be yours to crown you. This is a comprehensive promise, for God to be our God: it includes all.
they feel that, whatever it is that you are talking about, it is beyond them, and the longer they have lived without it the surer they are that at their stage of life they do not really need it.
They tend to dismiss a bad conscience, in themselves as in others, as an unhealthy psychological freak, a sign of disease and mental aberration rather than an index of moral reality.
they are at heart thoroughly good folks. Then, as pagans do (and modern man’s heart is pagan—make no mistake about that), they imagine God as a magnified image of themselves and assume that God shares his own complacency about himself.
Conceding that they are not perfect, they still have no doubt that respectability henceforth will guarantee God’s acceptance of them in the end, whatever they may have done in the past.
A guilty, weak, and helpless worm, Into thy hands I fall; Thou art the Lord, my righteousness, My Savior, and my all.
But his fullest account of it is in the massive paragraph—for, despite subdivisions, the flow of thought constitutes essentially one paragraph—running from Ephesians 1:3 to 2:10.
If the plan of salvation is certain of accomplishment, then the Christian’s future is assured. I am, and will be, “kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation” (1 Pet 1:5 KJV). I need not torment myself with the fear that my faith may fail; as grace led me to faith in the first place, so grace will keep me believing to the end.
Those who suppose that the doctrine of God’s grace tends to encourage moral laxity (“final salvation is certain anyway, no matter what we do; therefore our conduct doesn’t matter”) are simply showing that, in the most literal sense, they do not know what they are talking about. For love awakens love in return; and love, once awakened, desires to give pleasure. And the revealed will of God is that those who have received grace should henceforth give themselves to “good works” (Eph 2:10; Titus 2:11-12); and gratitude will move anyone who has truly received grace to do as God requires, and daily
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there are few things stressed more strongly in the Bible than the reality of God’s work as Judge.
The one basic certainty underlying all discussion of life’s problems in Job, Ecclesiastes and all the practical maxims of Proverbs is that “God will bring you to judgment,” “God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil” (Eccles 11:9; 12:14).
The entire New Testament is overshadowed by the certainty of a coming day of universal judgment, and by the problem thence arising: How may we sinners get right with God while there is yet time?
The Jesus of the New Testament, who is the world’s Savior, is its Judge as well.
The modern idea that a judge should be cold and dispassionate has no place in the Bible.
Would a God who did not care about the difference between right and wrong be a good and admirable Being? Would a God who put no distinction between the beasts of history, the Hitlers and Stalins (if we dare use names), and his own saints, be morally praiseworthy and perfect?
God’s own appointment has made Jesus Christ inescapable. He stands at the end of life’s road for everyone without exception. “Prepare to meet your God” was Amos’s message to Israel (Amos 4:12); “prepare to meet the risen Jesus” is God’s message to the world today (see Acts 17:31). And we can be sure that he who is true God and perfect man will make a perfectly just judge.
How do free forgiveness and justification by faith square with judgment according to works?
the gift of justification does not at all shield believers from being assessed as Christians, and from forfeiting good which others will enjoy if it turns out that as Christians they have been slack, mischievous and destructive.
Reward and loss signify an enriched or impoverished relationship with God, though in what ways it is beyond our present power to know.
“A study of the concordance will show that there are more references in Scripture to the anger, fury, and wrath of God, than there are to His love and tenderness”
The root cause of our unhappiness seems to be a disquieting suspicion that ideas of wrath are in one way or another unworthy of God.
The basis of this habit is the fact that God made us in his own image, so that human personality and character are more like the being of God than anything else we know.
the worm that dieth not (Mk 9:47), an image, it seems, for the endless dissolution of the personality by a condemning conscience; fire for the agonizing awareness of God’s displeasure; outer darkness for knowledge of the loss, not merely of God, but of all good and of everything that made life seem worth living; gnashing of teeth for self-condemnation and self-loathing.
The essence of God’s action in wrath is to give men what they choose, in all its implications: nothing more, and equally nothing less.
This appears in the story of God’s first act of wrath toward humanity, in Genesis 3, where we learn that Adam had already chosen to hide from God and keep clear of his presence, before ever God drove him from the Garden.
Otherwise we shall not understand the gospel of salvation from wrath, nor the propitiatory achievement of the cross, nor the wonder of the redeeming love of God.
Yet the Santa Claus theology carries within itself the seeds of its own collapse, for it cannot cope with the fact of evil. It is no accident that when belief in the “good God” of liberalism became widespread, about the turn of the twentieth century, the so-called problem of evil (which was not regarded as a problem before) suddenly leaped into prominence as the number one concern of Christian apologetics.
Generosity means a disposition to give to others in a way which has no mercenary motive and is not limited by what the recipients deserve but consistently goes beyond it.
The biblical way of putting this distinction would be to say that God is good to all in some ways and to some in all ways.
if, now, he (in Whitefield’s phrase) puts thorns in your bed, it is only to awaken you from the sleep of spiritual death—and to make you rise up to seek his mercy.
Since we are more like God than is any other being known to us, it is more illuminating and less misleading for God to picture himself to us in human terms than any other.
But there is another sort of jealousy: zeal to protect a love relationship or to avenge it when broken.
This sort of jealousy is a positive virtue, for it shows a grasp of the true meaning of the husband-wife relationship, together with a proper zeal to keep it intact.
For God’s ultimate objective, as the Bible declares it, is threefold—to vindicate his rule and righteousness by showing his sovereignty in judgment upon sin; to ransom and redeem his chosen people; and to be loved and praised by them for his glorious acts of love and self-vindication.
The jealousy of God requires us to be zealous for God.
