Wei > Wei's Quotes

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“If a person professes faith in Christ and yet falls away or makes no progress in godliness, it does not mean that he has lost his salvation. It reveals that he was never truly converted.”
― Paul Washer, The Gospel's Power & Message

“The flesh of Christ is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself. Now who does not see that communion of Christ’s flesh and blood is necessary for all who aspire to heavenly life?”81”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“This may be the most valuable and the most challenging thing we can learn from Calvin’s ecclesiology today: that the church is not something that we form of our own accord. It is not a product of our reaching out to God, but a gift of God reaching out to us.”107”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“The church’s principal officers are not monks, artisans, and a retinue of priests whose calling is to serve images they’ve made, but heralds, announcing God’s mighty acts in history. Zwingli’s”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“It is the theology of the cross over against theologies of glory that drives Calvin’s reforming zeal.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Jerome does not condemn singing absolutely, but he corrects those who sing theatrically, or who sing not in order to arouse devotion but to show off or to provoke pleasure. Hence Augustine says, When it happens that I am more moved by the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned, and then I would rather not hear the singer. Arousing men to devotion through preaching and teaching”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Jerome does not condemn singing absolutely, but he corrects those who sing theatrically, or who sing not in order to arouse devotion but to show off or to provoke pleasure. Hence Augustine says, When it happens that I am more moved by the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned, and then I would rather not hear the singer. Arousing men to devotion through preaching and teaching is a more excellent way than through singing.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Only a misunderstanding of Calvin’s theology could prompt the question Why pray if God is sovereign? The Reformer himself might turn the question back on us: Why pray if God isn’t sovereign?”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Out of the lavishness displayed in the marvelous variety and richness of creation itself, God continues to pour out his common blessings on all people. Therefore, we neither hoard possessions as if God’s gifts were scarce nor deny ourselves pleasures as if God were stingy.”
― Michael S. Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way

“Our natural reason tells us that good people finish first and cheaters never prosper. However, believers have no right to God’s common grace any more than they do to his saving grace. God remains free to show compassion on whomever he will, even to give breath, health, prosperity, and friends to those who breathe threats against him.”
― Michael S. Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way

“To affirm soli Deo gloria (to God alone be glory) is not to deny that both doctors and God are healers—one as the secondary or instrumental cause and the other as the primary or ultimate cause. In fact, it is only when we recognize God’s hand in everyday providence, through means, that we are able to attribute everything ultimately to his glory.”
― Michael S. Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way

“When the free will moves itself, this does not exclude its being moved by another, from whom it receives the very power to move itself.”
― Michael S. Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way

“The orthodox hold the mean between these extremes, maintaining that the providence of God is so occupied about sin as neither idly to permit it (as the Pelagians think) nor efficiently to produce it (as the Libertines suppose), but efficaciously to order and direct it.”18”
― Michael S. Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way

“Nine times out of ten, I believe that the church should first discern who should be considering the Christian ministry, not simply act as a rubber stamp for a putative internal call that an individual may think he has.”
― Anonymous

“With the church, the destiny of the whole is greater than the sum of the destinies of individual Christians.”
― Anonymous

“The problem today is that too many have the idea that God’s primary plan is for them, and the church is secondary, the instrument to the realization of their individual significance.”
― Anonymous

“But if you have an unmessianic sense of nondestiny, this is unlikely to be a problem: you won’t consider yourself important enough to justify breaking a solemn, public vow.”
― Anonymous

“If you do not regard the great confessions and catechisms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as being biblical in their teaching on justification, then you should probably do the decent thing and become a Catholic.”
― Anonymous

“For me, the right to claim Question One of the Heidelberg Catechism as my own, as the most profound statement of a truly childlike faith and ethic, is too precious to cede either to the numpties of postmodern evangelicalism or the geniuses of Rome, even the great Newman:”
― Anonymous

“The writer, Katherine Anne Porter, comments in her Notebooks that “[o]ne of the most disturbing habits of the human mind is its willful and destructive forgetting of whatever in its past does not flatter or confirm its present point of view.”
― Anonymous

“Let’s keep funerals for grieving and lamentation at the outrage that sin has perpetrated on the world. Keep the happy endings for Disney’s sugar-coated castration of classic fiction.”
― Anonymous

“The unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church depend entirely on what it hears and tells.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“What we need to be rescued from is not our physical nature, our metaphysical finitude, but our personal estrangement from God. Indeed, it is sin even to seek the identity with God that the Gnostics promoted. Creatures should never seek to become God.”
― Anonymous

“Serving brings great rewards, but sometimes those rewards come gift-wrapped in trying situations. Those who lovingly serve others can end up feeling like crash dummies designed specifically to discover the heat, force, and pain tolerance of some new product.”
― Thabiti M. Anyabwile, Finding Faithful Elders and Deacons

“So everyone believes in some kind of limitation. Either the atonement is limited in its extent or it is limited in its efficacy. I think the Bible teaches that it is limited in its extent, unlimited in its efficacy.”
― Anonymous

“If a man says that having thought about the matter and having considered all sides he has on the whole decided for Christ, and if he has done so without any emotion or feeling, I cannot regard him as a man who has been regenerated. The convicted sinner no more ‘decides’ for Christ than the poor drowning man ‘decides’ to take hold of that rope that is thrown to him and suddenly provides him with the only means of escape.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers

“The gospel . . . is the power of God for salvation,” and, with Paul, we have no reason to be ashamed of it (Rom 1:16). That is why phrases like “living the gospel,” “being the gospel,” and “being partners with Jesus in his redemption of the world” are dangerous distortions of the biblical message of good news. The gospel is not about what we have done or are called to do, but the announcement of God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor 4:5).”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“How does the “absence” of God colour the theme of deliverance in the book of Esther and contribute to its distinctive theology? . . . [It shows that] God is present even when he is most absent; when there are no miracles, dreams, or visions, no charismatic leaders, no prophets to interpret what is happening, and not even any explicit God-talk. And he is present as deliverer. Those whom he saved by signs and wonders at the exodus he continues to save through his hidden, providential control of their history. His people are”
― Bryan R. Gregory, Inconspicuous Providence: The Gospel According to Esther