Edwards on the Christian Life Quotes

“To become a Christian is to become alive to beauty.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“By far the greatest functional heresy I believe is that holiness is boring and lustful selfishness is fun.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“What an honor must it be,” preached Edwards, “to a creature who is infinitely below God, and less than he, to be beautified and adorned with this beauty, with that beauty which is the highest beauty of God himself, even holiness.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“For all of us, there is an internal bewildering that builds over time when we neglect private communion with God. Who we are and who God is both fade. It is in withdrawal from everything and everyone to be with God that we re-center. It is when we are alone with him that there is least chance for playing games, wearing a mask, hiding our sins, covering our anxieties. It is then that we can most fully open our hearts up to God.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“The Christian life, he says, is to enjoy and reflect the beauty of God. Everything Edwards wrote on Christian living funnels down into this. All the obedience and giving and generosity and kindness and praying and Bible reading in the world, without a heart-sense of divine beauty, is empty. Even damning.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“In a 1752 sermon Edwards says that it is Christ, supremely in his mercy to sinners, who is the magnetic beauty to which we are drawn. It is a sight of the divine beauty of Christ, that bows the wills, and draws the hearts of men. A sight of the greatness of God in his attributes, may overwhelm men, and be more than they can endure; but the enmity and opposition of the heart, may remain in its full strength, and the will remain inflexible; whereas, one glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God, and supreme amiableness of Jesus Christ, shining into the heart, overcomes and abolishes this opposition, and inclines the soul to Christ, as it were, by an omnipotent power.24”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“The trouble is that we reflexively think of obedience as doing what we don’t want to do. Ponder the word obedience for a moment. Don’t you immediately think of that as submitting to what another wants us to do? I can either obey God, we think, or I can do what I want to do. C. S. Lewis exposed this way of thinking with remarkable clarity in a little 1940s essay entitled “Three Kinds of Men.” He points out that there are not two ways to conceive of obeying God but three. It is not so simple as merely obeying or disobeying. For even “obeying” can be done from a wrong heart. So Lewis explains that there are three sorts of people. The first live totally for themselves. The second know they should live a certain way, and they sincerely try to do so, but only after they have first ensured their own security and happiness. Lewis compares this kind of obedience to paying a tax—they pay it all right, “but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on.”2 In other words, their time is divided, so that every action is either for their own sake or for the sake of this other, higher power, whether God, some ethical code, the government, their own conscience, or whatever. The third kind of person, however, no longer has this divide. These people have killed their old self. They aren’t trying to balance their internal desires and the external claim on them. The external claim has become their internal desire. As Lewis says, “The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, belongs also to them, for they are His.”3 Lewis then draws the following conclusion: And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on. As long as we are in this class we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have. The Christian doctrine that there is no “salvation” by works done to the moral law is a fact of daily experience. Back or on we must go. But there is no going on simply by our own efforts. If the new Self, the new Will, does not come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically. The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort—it is to want Him.4”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“The True Christian’s Life a Journey Towards Heaven”— God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper happiness, and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here: better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of any or all earthly friends. These are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops; but God is the ocean. Therefore, it becomes us to spend this life only as a journey towards heaven.15”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Of the more excellent nature any blessing is that we stand in need of, the more ready God is to bestow it in answer to prayer.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Religious Affections: Some are greatly affected from time to time, when in company; but have nothing that bears any manner of proportion to it, in secret, in close meditation, secret prayer, and conversing with God, when alone, and separated from all the world. A true Christian doubtless delights in religious fellowship, and Christian conversation, and finds much to affect his heart in it: but he also delights at times to retire from all mankind, to converse with God in solitary places. And this also has its peculiar advantages for fixing his heart, and engaging its affections. True religion disposes persons to be much alone, in solitary places, for holy meditation and prayer.20”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Prayer is God the Holy Spirit bringing us to commune with God the Father through God the Son. Far from arid drudgery, prayer is opening the door to “an infinite fountain of divine glory and sweetness.”13 We make prayer boring; God doesn’t. You wouldn’t blame the Sistine Chapel when the three-year-old begs to go home twenty minutes into the tour. It is the human’s lack of capacity, not the object’s lack of worthiness, that causes boredom.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Packer once inimitably put it, Edwards “uncoils a length of reasoning with a slow, smooth exactness that is almost hypnotic in its power to rivet attention on the successive folds of truth sliding out into view.”)”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Show me the condition of your Bible,” wrote A. W. Tozer, “and I will accurately predict the condition of your soul.”33”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“In short, Scripture—every word—is that through which God speaks of his own beauty. Scripture is God’s tool of human beautification.1 It is that through which God comforts and changes us. It is therefore the treasure of the Christian life.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Martin Luther, wrote in 1528 to Duke John Frederick: “God has promised great mercy to those who seek peace and endure guile when he says: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ War does not gain much, but loses much and risks everything. Gentleness, however, loses nothing, risks little, and gains everything.”4”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Edwards wrote in his diary on February 16, 1725: “A virtue, which I need in a higher degree, to give a beauty and luster to my behavior, is gentleness. If I had more of an air of gentleness, I should be much mended.”3”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“As Samuel Rutherford wrote to a friend a century before Edwards, “Hunger on, for there is food in hunger for Christ.”19 The desiring is the possessing.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Edwards would agree with the way modern thinker Cornelius Plantinga puts it: “Ultimate joy comes not from a lover or a landscape or a home, but through them. . . . They point to what is ‘higher up’ and ‘further back.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“we have seen, in a sermon on 1 John 4:16 Edwards says that “he who has divine love in him has a wellspring of true happiness that he carries about in his own breast, a fountain of sweetness, a spring of the water of life.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“To be born again is to be welcomed into the fountain-like heavenly delight of intratrinitarian love.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“a cold and hard-hearted Christian is the greatest absurdity and contradiction. It is as if one should speak of dark brightness, or a false truth!”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“The very nature of God is love. If it should be enquired what God is, it might be answered that he is an infinite and incomprehensible fountain of love.”5”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“New birth is not self-surrender essentially, but divinely imported life. “The new birth is not the product of the will of man but of the will of God,” Edwards says. God regenerates “with a potent irresistible energy.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“In Religious Affections Edwards puts it even more succinctly: regeneration “is that work of God in which grace is infused.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“We can’t change ourselves. Edwards wrote to the Scottish pastor John Erskine in 1757, “There can properly be no such thing, or anything akin to what the Scripture speaks of conversion, renovation of the heart, regeneration, etc. if growing good, by a number of self-determined acts, are all that is required.”4”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“He suffered that we might be delivered. His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death, to take away the sting of sorrow, and to impart everlasting consolation. He was oppressed and afflicted, that we might be supported. He was overwhelmed in the darkness of death, that we might have the light of life. He was cast into the furnace of God’s wrath, that we might drink of the rivers of his pleasures. His soul was overwhelmed with a flood of sorrow, that our hearts might be overwhelmed with a flood of eternal joy.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“pastor, above all, is to provide for people a glimpse of the radiant loveliness of Christ. All their preaching, discipling, counseling, and administrating are channels through which divine luminosity is beheld. The fundamental calling of leaders of God’s people is not only to be under-shepherds of the chief Shepherd but also under-beautifiers of the chief Beautifier.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“And if what defines God supremely is his beauty or loveliness or excellency, then to participate in the triune life of God is to be swept up into, and to exude, that heavenly resplendence. A Christian is one who is being beautified. This is because Christian living is fundamentally participation in the unceasing explosion of delighted intratrinitarian joy and love.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“one miscellany that considers the glorified body of Christ, Edwards reflects on what believers’ physical eyes will be like in their glorified existence in the new earth. He surmises that believers in the new heavens and the new earth will be able to see across the entire universe since Christ, not the sun, will be lighting the whole universe, and the light emitted by Christ’s glorified body must be far faster than the speed of light in a solar system lit up by our sun.27”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Edwards even argues in a sermon on James 1:17 that the reason no one can see God and live is not God’s wrath or justice, but because “God is arrayed with an infinite brightness” that “fills with excess of joy and delight,” so that “the joy and pleasure in beholding would be too strong for a frail nature.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God