Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In salvation, God both declares us guilty and pays our debt. Only he can satisfy his own requirements. A savior less than God would be disqualified; God must do it himself.
Someone has said that the marks of a strong church are wet eyes, bent knees, and a broken heart. We'll never be powerful until we let God be God and jealously guard His honor.
I think that as Christians we need to walk the delicate balance between standing in opposition to same-sex marriages and yet showing that we can do that without becoming angry or hateful.
Forgiveness is always free. But that doesn't mean that confession is always easy. Sometimes it is hard. Incredibly hard. It is painful to admit our sins and entrust ourselves to God's care.
If Melanchthon were alive today, he might not weep because of controversies that surround the Lord's Supper, but he might well sorrow because of our indifference to its meaning and importance.
To make sure our convictions, views, and assumptions about our Creator stay based on biblical truth and not on popular consensus, we must continually check what we believe against the Scriptures.
At death we cross from one territory to another, but we'll have no trouble with visas. Our representative is already there, preparing for our arrival. As citizens of heaven, our entrance is incontestable.
If there is one single reason why good people turn evil, it is because they fail to recognize God’s ownership over their kingdom, their vocation, their resources, their abilities, and above all their lives.
Better to love God and die unknown than to love the world and bea hero; better to be content with poverty than to die a slave towealth; better to have taken some risks and lost than to havedone nothing and succeeded at it.
Worship is not an external activity precipitated by the right environment. To worship in spirit is to draw near to God with an undivided heart. We must come in full agreement without hiding anything or disregarding His will.
We need a broad-based coalition that is way beyond the bounds of Christianity to be able to help people to understand that there is a groundswell of support for the marriage amendment and for opposition to same-sex marriages.
Our brothers and sisters in Muslim countries can't celebrate Christmas-or any aspect of their faith-openly for fear of persecution and death. And yet we, with all our freedoms, often choose to make Christmas a celebration of commercialism!
If we haven't learned to be worshipers it doesn't really matter how well we do anything else. Worship changes us or it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change. Worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience.
We must distinguish between genes that cause physical characteristics, like the color of your eyes or hair, over which you have no control, and what we could call 'behavioral dispositions'. We are responsible for our behavior, no matter what those dispositions are.
People do not have a constitutional right to be married any more than we could say that someone has a constitutional right to a driver's license. You either meet the requirements or you don't. In the case of marriage, homosexuals do not meet the requirements of marriage.
To those who say that they are Christian and gay, what we must keep in mind is that absent in that kind of lifestyle is a call to holiness, a call to celibacy and integrity. Obviously, it is a capitulation toward one's desires and the sexual sins that the Bible so strongly condemns.
God in His sovereign goodness often uses the painful and at times debilitating injury of a spear thrower to make us readier for His service. ... One thing you discover about spear throwers is that though it’s not necessary for them to be good, it’s essential for them to appear good.
We must worship in truth. Worship is not just an emotional exercise but a response of the heart built on truth about God. "The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth" (Psm. 145:18). Worship that is not based on God's Word is but an emotional encounter with oneself.
Within evangelicalism is a distressing drift toward accepting a Christianity that does not demand a life-changing walk with God. Many evangelicals (today) do not realize that the church has always been an island of righteousness in a sea of paganism, but as a result they turned the world upside-down.
Paul taught that religions evolved because man did not honor the true God. Because of rebellion, they "exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of the corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures." One characteristic of idolatry is that it always confuses the creature with the creator.
The ability to make judgments lies at the heart of Christian living. Unless we are able to judge doctrine, lifestyles, and entertainment, unless we are able to distinguish between outer appearance and inner character, we just might miss the purpose for which God placed us on this earth. We might end up accepting a stone for bread and a snake for a fish.
Generally, the arguments for same-sex marriage go along these lines: 'I have a civil right.' What the homosexual movement wants to do is to hitch their agenda to the civil rights movement, but I point out that this is illegitimate for a number of reasons. Number one, no black person has ever left his black-ness or changed his black-ness, but plenty of people have come out of the homosexual movement. What we need to do is distinguish between race and behavior.
Children who are brought up with one parent or another parent or shared parenthood, when there has been a divorce and hatred within families, it breeds a tremendous amount of instability in the life of a child. And many of these children end up in the homosexual movement. Even if they don't, they take so much baggage into their marriages, that they are unable sometimes, at least theoretically unable, to stand against all of the cultural forces that would disrupt them and their families.