The Unquenchable Flame Quotes

“While these ‘five points of Calvinism’ reveal a growing interest in predestination among Calvinists, they were drawn up to protect what the Calvinists believed were important truths denied by the Arminians. They were never intended to be a summary of Calvinist belief or Calvin’s own thought.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’. How so? Because, since ‘God’s love resteth on Christ, as well pleased in him, we may gather that he is as well pleased with us, if we be in Christ!’ Thus Christian confidence in our spiritual state rests not on our strength of faith or performance, but upon ‘the joint agreement of all three persons of the Trinity’, that the Father loves the Son, and it is in the Son’s merits, and not our own, that Christians are loved. Because God is a loving community, Christians can be confident. Then, instead of simply laying moral burdens on young and struggling Christians, Sibbes showed them Christ’s attractiveness so that they might love him from the heart. From then, the Christian’s first task is ‘to warm ourselves at this fire of his love and mercy in giving himself for us’. Only when Christians do that do they truly stop sinning from the heart (whereas when they merely alter their behaviour it does nothing for the sin of the heart). In other words, Sibbes believed that the solution to sin is not the attempt to live without sin, but the gospel of God’s free grace.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Luther discovered as ‘justification by God’s word’ instead of ‘justification by faith’, because it is God’s word that justifies here, not our faith. Faith, thought Luther, is not some inner resource we must summon up; if it were, it would by his definition be sin! For him, the question ‘Have I got enough faith?’ completely misunderstands what faith is, by looking to and so relying on itself, rather than Christ. Faith is a passive thing, simply accepting, receiving, believing Christ—taking God seriously in what he promises in the gospel.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“A profoundly relevant, beautiful, and sweet message, a joy-giving message, a death-defying message: it is no wonder Richard Sibbes called the Reformation ‘that fire which all the world shall never be able to quench’.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“The closer one looks, the clearer it becomes: the Reformation was not, principally, a negative movement, about moving away from Rome; it was a positive movement, about moving towards the gospel.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Puritanism, after all, had been a movement concerned with words (and the word of God), and so when Puritans were no longer educated, the muscle of the movement wasted away. Worse, without strong ties to biblical moorings, over the years that followed many found themselves drifting outside belief in such Christian basics as the Trinity.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory about every Christian (journeying from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City), but it is particularly reflective of Bunyan’s own experience. A tinker by trade, Bunyan was used to travelling from village to village with a 60-pound anvil and hefty toolkit on his back: it became a model for the great burden of sin his pilgrim carries on his back (until he comes to the cross and it is ‘loosed from off his shoulders’ to his enormous relief).”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“More, for the first time in nearly four hundred years, Jews were allowed back into England (the idea was that they might be converted, the conversion of Israel precipitating the Second Coming, but they were allowed to worship freely).”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“it is a striking feature of Sibbes’s preaching how strongly Christ-focused he is. And that is no accident: Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“However, there was a considerable danger for such a fight (one that threatened not only Puritanism, but also its sister-movement in Germany, Lutheran Pietism). That is, the desire to have people respond to the gospel could lead to a focus on the response, not the gospel. So, in looking for reformed lives (the sign that a person had responded rightly to the gospel), it was easy to let a concern for growth in personal holiness eclipse the original Reformation focus on justification. In other words, the danger for the Puritans was that they would be tempted to concentrate on holy living in response to the gospel at the expense of proclaiming the free, saving grace of God.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Richard Sibbes said, ‘What a joyful spectacle is this to Satan and his faction, to see those that are separated from the world fall in pieces among themselves! Our discord is our enemy’s melody.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Alas! can we think that the reformation is wrought, when we cast out a few ceremonies, and changed some vestures, and gestures, and forms! Oh no, sirs! it is the converting and saving of souls that is our business. That is the chiefest part of reformation.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“If anything, what that difference proves is how the Reformation, at its heart, was about doctrine. It was not a quest for political, social, or moral reform dressed up in theological clothes; deeper down than anything else was a set of theological questions: ‘What is the gospel?’ ‘How can we know?’ ‘What is salvation, and how can I be saved?’ ‘Who are God’s people, and what is the church?”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Henry’s younger daughter Elizabeth was very much a chip off the old block. Imperious and relentlessly energetic, she had a quicksilver mind capable of lightning-fast repartee, and enough political cunning to survive Mary’s reign without slipping up. And, being who she was, everyone knew she would reintroduce Protestantism.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“In 1555, Ridley and Latimer were burned together, back to back, at the end of Broad Street in Oxford. Latimer, aged about eighty, was the first to die, shouting through the flames: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“In Cambridge, one group of dons was known to gather at the White Horse Inn, where all the Luther-talk and beer made it look so like Wittenberg that it was soon nicknamed ‘Little Germany’.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Post tenebras lux”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“His purpose, instead, he wrote, ‘was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness’. It was designed as a simple introduction to the evangelical faith (‘Institutes’ means ‘basic instruction’).”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Calvin could never have been a celebrity Christian: a camera-shy intellectual, he always avoided the limelight. His portraits show a thin face, that often-throbbing head covered with a simple black cap, and strikingly intense eyes. In that, they are quite revealing, for while pitifully weak in body and naturally retiring by temperament, he was dauntingly strong in both mind and will. A lamb he was born, a lion he became for the Lord who saved him.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Under his guidance, Anabaptism moved away from bloody revolutions and private revelations. The Mennonites were to be peaceful and biblical. Thus Menno sealed the victory of the Zurich Anabaptist martyr Felix Mantz’s nonaggressive, biblical radicalism.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Anabaptism, on the whole, tended to be more interested in Christian living than theology. For the Magisterial Reformers2 like Luther, theology came first, informing how we then live; for the Anabaptists, holiness came first, and theology was then done to spur on Christian obedience.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Yet to the end he had a personality that could set the Rhine on fire. Some loved it, others wished he could be at least a little less rude and raw. Certainly he was no stained-glass ideal. Perhaps, though, such a red-blooded and blunt man was just what was needed for the momentous and seemingly impossible task of challenging all Christendom and turning it around. He was shock-therapy for the world. And, somehow, his personality seems fit for the gospel he uncovered: he inspires no moral self-improvement in would-be disciples; instead, his evident humanity testifies to a sinner’s absolute need for God’s grace.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Luther came out of hiding, returned to Wittenberg, and, instead of using force to reform, sought to persuade people with the Scriptures through simple, clear preaching. He believed that the word of God must first convince people, and then the rotten old structures would collapse. It was exactly what he had stood for before the emperor, that it is the Scriptures that must drive and dictate thought and practice. As a result, Luther never believed that he should devise any great programme for spreading the Reformation. He simply wanted to unleash the word of God, and let that do all the work.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“The first main work, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, was Luther’s trumpet blast of reformation against the defensive walls Rome had built around herself. There were three such walls, he said: Rome’s first defence was the claim that the pope was the supreme power on earth; the second, that only the pope may interpret the Scriptures; the third, that no one but the pope may summon a council and thus reform the church.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“The Christian life, then, could not be about the sinner’s struggle to achieve his own, paltry human righteousness; it was about accepting God’s own, perfect divine righteousness. Here now was a God who does not want our goodness but our trust. All the struggles and all the anxiety could be replaced with massive confidence and simple faith, receiving the gift.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Now he saw that forgiveness is not dependent on how certain the sinner is that he has been truly contrite; forgiveness comes simply by receiving the promise of God. Thus the sinner’s hope is found, not in himself, but outside himself, in God’s word of promise.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Over the following months he became increasingly clear that, if Rome held the pope to be an authority above Scripture, she could never be reformed by God’s word. The pope’s word would always trump God’s. In that case, the reign of the antichrist there was sealed, and it was no longer the church of God but the synagogue of Satan.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Such were most Christians on the eve of the Reformation: devoted, and devoted to the improvement, but not the overthrow, of their religion. This was not a society looking for radical change, only a clearing-up of acknowledged abuses.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“There are those like Peter James Lee, Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, who said in 2004, ‘If you must make a choice between heresy and schism, always choose heresy.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation