Dave > Dave's Quotes

“Thus the motivation, energy and drive for holiness are all found in the reality and power of God's grace in Christ. And so if I am to make any progress in sanctification, the place where I must always begin is the gospel of the mercy of God to me in Christ Jesus.”
― Sinclair B. Ferguson, Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification

“But for the Reformers preaching was more than simply the transfer of information. The reality is that most of the time most of the congregation know the truths contained in the sermon. If you view preaching as simply a process of education, then you will pursue novelty, and that is a dangerous path to pursue. instead, we come to the preaching of the Word as those who need to hear Christ's voice and encounter his presence. We need to hear from him words of reassurance or words of challenge. Sometimes we will learn new things. But this is not the measure of good preaching. A wife does not want new information on her wedding anniversary. She wants her husband to reassure her of his continuing love. This is what Christ does for his bride each week through the preaching of the Word.”
― Michael Reeves

“There is no sin in complaining to God, but much wickedness in complaining of him.”
― John Flavel, A Token For Mourners: Or The Advice Of Christ To A Distressed Mother, Bewailing The Death Of Her Dear And Only Son

“Not only does the Lord through forgiveness of sins receive and adopt us once for all into the church, but through the same means he preserves and protects us there. For what would be the point of providing a pardon for us that was destined to be of no use? Every godly man is his own witness that the Lord's mercy, if it were granted only once, would be void and illusory, since each is quite aware throughout his life of the many infirmities that need God's mercy. And clearly not in vain does God promise this grace especially to those of his own household; not in vain does he order the same message of reconciliation daily to be brought to them. So, carrying, as we do, The traces of sin around with us throughout life, unless we are sustained by the Lord's constant Grace and forgiving our sins, we shall scarcely abide one moment in the church. But the Lord has called his children to eternal salvation. Therefore, they ought to ponder that there is pardon ever ready for their sins. Consequently, we must firmly believe that by God's generosity, mediated by Christ's merit, through the sanctification of the Spirit, sins have been and are daily pardoned to us Who have been received and engrafted into the body of the church.”
― John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 Vols

“There are three idols that Christians find very hard to mortify, namely, the applause of the world, the pleasures of the world, and the reproaches of the world.”
― Andrew Gray

“Unbelief is an evil thing; nothing puts so great a price on precious Christ as faith does. It is certain that unbelief keeps love at a very low exercise; likewise, unbelief hinders the grace of mortification. I can hardly believe that a Christian under the practice of unbelief can attain the mortification of any lust because he cannot take hold of Him in whose strength only will lusts be mortified.”
― Andrew Gray

“Preaching, then, is proclaiming God's desire to take hearers from where they are to where God wants them to be through the gospel.”
― Julius J. Kim, Preaching the Whole Counsel of God: Design and Deliver Gospel-Centered Sermons

“A Christian may likewise receive much joy and satisfaction from the consideration of the excellence and blessedness of heaven, when he remembers the greatness of his toil and labor, and when he thinks that once he shall be freed of all that ere long. Now then, let even the thoughts of the approaching of that day help you to bear your afflictions with patience. There is a precious and immense hope set before you that may remove all the bitterness of afflictions. The consideration of heaven may remove, I say, all the bitterness and anxiety in this time; it will cast a divine smell on all the crosses that we encounter in this life. A soul that is filled with the joy of heaven cannot be much anxious for the lack of anything here on earth.”
― Andrew Gray

“An acquiescence in the Lord's will, founded in a persuasion of his wisdom, holiness, sovereignty, and goodness.--This is one of the greatest privileges and brightest ornaments of our profession. So far as we attain to this, we are secure from disappointment. Our own limited views and short-sighted purposes and desires, may be, and will be, often over-ruled; but then our main and leading desire, that the will of the Lord may be done, must be accomplished. How highly does it become us, both as creatures and as sinners, to submit to the appointments of our Maker! And how necessary it is to our peace! This great attainment is too often unthought of, and overlooked: we are prone to fix our attention upon the second causes and immediate instruments of events; forgetting that whatever befalls us is according to his purpose, and therefore must be right and seasonable in itself, and shall in the issue be productive of good. From hence rise impatience, resentment, and secret repinings, which are not only sinful, but tormenting: whereas, if all things are in his hand; if the very hairs of our head are numbered; if every event great and small, is under the direction of his providence and purpose; and if he has a wise, holy, and gracious end in view, to which every thing that happens is subordinate and subservient; then we have nothing to do, but with patience and humility to follow as he leads, and cheerfully to expect a happy issue. The path of present duty is marked out; and the concerns of the next and every succeeding hour are in his hands. How happy are they who can resign all to him, see his hand in every dispensation, and believe that he chooses better for them than they possibly could for themselves!”
― John Newton, Jewels from John Newton: Daily

“It is indeed natural to us to wish and to plan, and it is merciful in the Lord to disappoint our plans, and to cross our wishes. For we cannot be safe, much less happy, but in proportion as we are weaned from our own wills, and made simply desirous of being directed by his guidance.”
― John Newton, Cardiphonia, Or, the Utterance of the Heart: In the Course of a Real Correspondence

“If Christ has freed us from the penalties, how ought we to subject ourselves to the precepts! If He has delivered us from the curses, how ought we to study the commands! If He paid our debt of sin, certainly we owe a debt of service.”
― Samuel Bolton, The True Bounds of Christian Freedom

“A passion for the local church should stem not from our work in the church, but from Christ's passion, plans for, and work in the local church. When this is the taproot from which we draw nourishment, we can serve and love one another motivated by God's grace, propelled by his love, and enabled by his Spirit.”
― Nate Palmer, Servanthood as Worship

“But we do not gather just in order to hear; we gather because gathering is important. Gathering is what Jesus does. The time when the whole local church gathers is a foretaste of the time when all redeemed humanity will gather. We could scrap Bible study groups and still be a church (an impoverished church, perhaps, but still a church); but if we fail to gather together in our main meetings under the preached word of God, we cease to be a church.”
― Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching

“So how is the world to be reassembled? Not by technology. Not by force. Not by natural human affection. Not by religion. But only by grace. Only the preached word of Christ, the word of grace preached again and again and again, pressed home with passion and engagement, only that word will create God's assembly to rebuild a broken world.”
― Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching

“The human heart” wrote Calvin, “has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.”
― Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters

“For liberal Protestants, the god presented in the Bible is only one limited perception of the deity, who became better understood through the progressive workings of history. The church likewise existed in history and had to be adapted and modernized for successive generations and cultures. Such an approach is liberal and its openness to changing ideas and standards, but the lack of any external absolutes allows the church to be swept along with contemporary political obsessions. In the German case, liberal Protestantism allowed itself to identify wholly with the emerging Wilhelmine Reich and came close to state worship, if not war worship.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade – Angels, Apocalypse, and the Spiritual Dimensions of Modern Violence

“There is one chief work that defines and centers all of human history. It is God’s work of salvation. History is the history of redemption. It is a grand narrative that shapes all of life and meaning. Redemption is the center, guiding and governing all the details. There is not chaos; there is nothing random. God has bent His bow. He has taken aim, and the arrow of His purposes and intentions will hit squarely on the mark. Not only does redemption give shape and meaning to human history, redemption gives shape and meaning to individual lives. The movie playing out on the big screen has not been left to chance. God governs history and moves it along toward His desired end and purpose as surely as the sun rises. The short clip, playing out on the small screen, has not been left to chance, either. God’s purposes for His people, the individual purposes for His individual people, will come to pass. We can have confidence in God’s work of redemption.”
― Stephen J. Nichols, A Time for Confidence: Trusting God in a Post-Christian Society

“The church is the real thing when it is not consumed with the assertion of power in culture, but it is driven by service to others. The word ministry translates the Greek word diakonia, which means service. The church must be about serving others. When a church can lay claim to all three criteria, namely, preaching of the Word, being true to its confession, and focusing on serving, then it’s a church worth going to. And then it’s a church full of sermons worth listening to.”
― Stephen J. Nichols, Bonhoeffer on the Christian Life: From the Cross, for the World

“We are not the first Christians trying to make sense of the Bible and trying to proclaim it faithfully and winsomely in the world in which we live.”
― Stephen J. Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World

“In the New Testament the basic command of old covenant life, 'Be holy as I am holy', now means, 'Become like Jesus.' God involves himself in this work as the triune Lord: the Father commands it; the Son has died to provide the resources for it; the Spirit indwells us in order to effect it in our lives. As Augustine famously prayed, God commands what he wills and gives what he commands.”
― Sinclair B. Ferguson, Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification

“As the early church fathers delighted in saying, Christ took what was ours so that we might receive what was His.”
― Sinclair B. Ferguson, In Christ Alone: Living the Gospel-Centered Life

“Yes, people will tell us they believe in a “God of love.” But they are self-deceived, and their lives reveal it. They neither love Him with heart, soul, mind, and strength in return, nor do they worship Him with zeal and energy. The truth is that their mantra “My God is a God of love” is a smokescreen, a phantasm of their imagination. Underneath it all is a deep mistrust of God—otherwise, why not yield the whole of life in joyful abandon to whatever He says or asks?”
― Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Trinitarian Devotion of John Owen

“Nothing is more common, easy, or agreeable to corrupt nature than to preach a multitude of the precious truths of Christ in a broken and disjointed manner without ever preaching the gospel of Christ.”
― John Brown of Haddington, Counsel to Gospel Ministers

“No man can rightly understand the power of indwelling corruption who has not savingly felt his own; nor how the law is the strength of sin, till that law be closely applied to his own conscience; nor why the gospel offer of Christ as a savior must be absolutely free and made to sinners as such, till he himself has had to struggle with sharp and strong convictions. No man can rightly apprehend how the assured belief of full and free salvation through Christ constrains to universal obedience till God's redeeming love be shed abroad in his heart; nor how much a disposition that doubts and staggers at the promises of eternal life, or which leads a man to recommend himself to God's favor by his good works, tends to hinder the cheerful progress in grace and true virtue till he himself has experienced the hurt of it.”
― John Brown of Haddington, Counsel to Gospel Ministers

“Pride, anger, naivete, and nostalga are like Stalin's communists waiting to deliver Poland out of the hands of Hitler's Nazis. What looks like a rescue only recovers and repeats the oppression. When God's people walk out of God's house and respond to the folly they find under the sun by becoming foolish themselves, there is little wonder why it can seem that God is nowhere to be found in the news, our neighborhoods, or our daily toil. We become like firefighters who, upon entering a burning building, disdain the water hoses and instead turn confidently to blowtorches and try helplessly to douse what blazes.”
― Zack Eswine, Recovering Eden: The Gospel According to Ecclesiastes

“Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.”
― John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence

“Repentance is not about earning grace but entering it; not about quenching his wrath but quieting the accusations of our hearts; not about unlocking his mercy but releasing our sin-sick sorrow to the Savior, who already rejoices to receive it.”
― Bryan Chapell, Unlimited Grace: The Heart Chemistry That Frees from Sin and Fuels the Christian Life

“The law, which was added to the promise, did not render the promise of no effect or obliterate it, but rather took the promise up into itself in order to be of service to the development and fulfillment of it. The promise is the main thing; the law is subordinate. The first is the goal; the second is the means. It is not in the law, but in the promise, that the core of the Revelation of God and the heart of Israel's religion lies. And because the promise is a promise of God, it is not a hollow sound, but a word full of power, which is the expression of a will bent on doing all that pleases God (Ps. 33:9 and Isa. 55:11). Therefore, this promise is the propelling force of Israel's history until it gets its fulfillment in Christ.”
― Herman Bavinck

“We can stop pleading with God to show us the future, and start living and obeying like we are confident that He holds the future.”
― Kevin DeYoung

“If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.”
― John C Wright