Authentic Fire Quotes

“There are Christians and churches that boast of being mature when really they are spiritually frostbitten. We have developed a prejudice against feeling and emotion until amens would be no scarcer if they cost a hundred dollars apiece -- and the real truth is, we have lost our first love. . . . This accounts for a lot of church troubles. When we love the Lord we love the brethren. When we break up the fallow ground of our hearts we uncover roots of bitterness. . . . There is a reckless enthusiasm about first love. It is not cold and calculating.”
― Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur's Strange Fire

“The trouble has generally been . . . that people have emphasized either experience or doctrine at the expense of the other. . . . This is something that has been happening in the church from almost the very beginning. . . . When the whole emphasis is placed upon one or the other, you either have a tendency to fanaticism and excess or a tendency toward a barren intellectualism and a mechanical and a dead kind of orthodoxy.”
― Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur's Strange Fire

“It’s easier to cool down a fanatic than to warm up a corpse.”
― Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur's Strange Fire

“It is the “gospel” of self, in which Jesus dies to make you into a bigger and better you, a “gospel” in which God is here to serve you and help you fulfill your dreams, and where the measure of all things is not how God feels about it but how you feel about it (or how it makes you feel).”
― Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur's Strange Fire

“In short, we should never develop our theology in a reactionary way. If we do, we will almost always go from one erroneous extreme to another, over-correcting our course as we go.”
― Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur's Strange Fire

“New Testament Christianity is not just a formal, polite, correct, and orthodox kind of faith and belief. No! What characterizes it is this element of love and passion, this pneumatic element, this life, this vigor, this abandon, this exuberance—and, as I say, it has ever characterized the life of the church in all periods of revival and of reawakening.”
― Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur's Strange Fire

“It is, of course, essential to remember that theology is not merely a matter of intellect, but also of experience. Theology is concerned with spiritual realities, and must include personal experience as well as ideas ... The feeling equally with reason must share in the consideration of theology, because theology is of the heart, and the deepest truths are inextricably bound up with personal needs and experiences.17”
― Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur's Strange Fire

“Then why aren’t the crowds knocking down our doors for the bread of life? (It may be happening in other parts of the world, but it is certainly not the norm in the United States.) Why aren’t they flocking to us for the only real antidote? It’s because we don’t have the goods! On top of that, we haven’t convinced the world that it is sick, starving, and on the verge of eternal death.”
― Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur's Strange Fire