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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...
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2. God’s promises are true, for God keeps them.
These things were understood once; but liberal theology, with its refusal to identify the written Scriptures with the word of God, has largely robbed us of the habit of meditating on the promises, and basing our prayers on the promises, and venturing in faith in our ordinary daily life just as far as the promises will take us.
People sneer today at the promise boxes which our grandparents used, but this attitude is not a wise one; the promise boxes may have been open to abuse, but the approach to Scripture, and to prayer, which they expressed was right. It is something we have lost and need to recover.
True Christians are people who acknowledge and live under the word of God.
Christians will tell you, if you ask them, that the Word of God has both convinced them of sin and assured them of forgiveness.
Revival means the work of God restoring to a moribund church,
“God is spirit.” When our Lord said this, he was seeking to disabuse the Samaritan woman of the idea that there could be only one right place for worship, as if God were locally confined in some way.
Spirit contrasts with flesh: Christ’s point is that while we, being flesh, can be present in only one place at a time, God, being spirit, is not so limited.
“Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away” (Song 8:7). Nothing can separate from it those whom it has once embraced (Rom 8:35-39).
God’s love is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners. It is not a vague, diffused good will toward everyone in general and nobody in particular; rather, as being a function of omniscient almightiness, its nature is to particularize both its objects and its effects.
The measure of love is how much it gives, and the measure of the love of God is the gift of his only Son to become human, and to die for sins, and so to become the one mediator who can bring us to God.
6. God’s love to sinners reaches its objective as it brings them to know and enjoy him in a covenant relation. A covenant relation is one in which two parties are permanently pledged to each other in mutual service and dependence
Is it true that God is love to me as a Christian? And does the love of God mean all that has been said? If so, certain questions arise. Why do I ever grumble and show discontent and resentment at the circumstances in which God has placed me? Why am I ever distrustful, fearful or depressed? Why do I ever allow myself to grow cool, formal and halfhearted in the service of the God who loves me so? Why do I ever allow my loyalties to be divided, so that God has not all my heart?
Could an observer learn from the quality and degree of love that I show to others—my wife? my husband? my family? my neighbors? people at church? people at work?—anything at all about the greatness of God’s love to me?
But many church people are not like this. They may pay lip service to the idea of grace, but there they stop.
The moral ill-desert of man.
They view material wealth as in any case more important than moral character, and in the moral realm they are resolutely kind to themselves, treating small virtues as compensating for great vices and refusing to take seriously the idea that, morally speaking, there is anything much wrong with them.
For modern men and women are convinced that, despite all their little peccadilloes—drinking, gambling, reckless driving, sexual laxity, black and white lies, sharp practice in trading, dirty reading, and what have you—they are at heart thoroughly good folks.
The retributive justice of God.
The way of modern men and women is to turn a blind eye to all wrongdoing as long as they safely can.
3. The spiritual impotence of man.
Ancient pagans thought to do this by multiplying gifts and sacrifices; modern pagans seek to do it by churchmanship and morality.
“No one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law,” declares Paul
To mend our own relationship with God, regaining God’s favor after having once lost it, is beyond the power of any one of us. And one must see and bow to this before one can share the biblical faith in God’s grace.
The sovereign freedo...
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We can only claim from him justice—and justice, for us, means certain condemnation. God does not owe it to anyone to stop justice taking its course. He is not obliged to pity and pardon; if he does so it is an act done, as we say, “of his own free will,” and nobody forces his hand.
We have seen why the thought of grace means so little to some church people—namely, because they do not share the beliefs about God and man which it presupposes.
Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance.
Justification is by faith; it takes place the moment a person puts vital trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior.
No apology is needed for drawing so freely on our rich heritage of “free grace hymns” (poorly represented, alas, in most standard hymnbooks of the twentieth century);
It has been said that in the New Testament doctrine is grace, and ethics is gratitude; and something is wrong with any form of Christianity in which, experimentally and practically, this saying is not being verified.
Oh! to grace how great a debtor Daily I’m constrained to be; Let that grace now, like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to Thee! Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love— Take my heart, oh, take and seal it, Seal it for Thy courts above!
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 New Testament looks on to “the day of judgment,” “the day of wrath,” “the wrath to come,” and proclaims Jesus, the divine Savior, as the divinely appointed Judge.
God’s nature is retribution, the rendering to persons what they have deserved; for this is the essence of the judge’s task. To reward good with good, and evil with evil, is natural to God.
It is clear that the reality of divine judgment must have a direct effect on our view of life. If we know that retributive judgment faces us at the end of the road, we shall not live as otherwise we would.
Rightly does the Anglican burial service address Jesus in a single breath as “holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal.”
“Men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned”
Final judgment will also be according to our knowledge. All people know something of God’s will through general revelation, even if they have not been instructed in the law or the gospel, and all are guilty before God for falling short of the best they knew.
The principle operating here is that “where a man has been given much, much will be expected of him” (v. 48 NEB). The justice of this is obvious. In every case the Judge of all the earth will do right.
Wrath is an old English word defined in my dictionary as “deep, intense anger and indignation.” Anger is defined as “stirring of resentful displeasure and strong antagonism, by a sense of injury or insult”; indignation as “righteous anger aroused by injustice and baseness.”
To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex and self-will, the church mumbles on about God’s kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment.
“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” (A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God, p. 75).
The Bible labors the point that just as God is good to those who trust him, so he is terrible to those who do not.
Would a God who did not react adversely to evil in his world be morally perfect? Surely not. But it is precisely this adverse reaction to evil, which is a necessary part of moral perfection, that the Bible has in view when it speaks of God’s wrath.
Then to others the thought of God’s wrath suggests cruelty. They think, perhaps, of what they have been told about Jonathan Edwards’s famous gospel sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which God used to bring awakening to the town of Enfield, in New England, in 1741. In this sermon Edwards, enlarging on his theme that “natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell,” used some most vivid furnace imagery to make his congregation feel the horror of their position
God will see, says Edwards in the sermon already referred to, “that you shall not suffer beyond what strict justice requires”—but it is precisely “what strict justice requires,” he insists, that will be so grievous for those who die in unbelief.
In the second place, God’s wrath in the Bible is something which people choose for themselves.
Yet if we would know God, it is vital that we face the truth concerning his wrath, however unfashionable it may be, and however strong our initial prejudices against
