A.W. Tozer, The Radical Cross | “As there is now no babe in the manger at Bethlehem sot here is no man on the cross at Jerusalem. To worship the babe in the manger or the man on the cross is to reverse the redemptive processes of God and turn the clock back on His eternal purposes. Let the Church place its emphasis upon the cross and there can be only pessimism, gloom and fruitless remorse. Let a sick man die hugging a crucifix and what have we there? Two dead men in a bed, neither of which can help the other.
The glory of the Christian faith is that the Christ who died for our sins rose again for our justification. We should joyfully remember His birth and gratefully muse on His dying, but the crown of all our hope is with Him at the Father’s right hand.”
Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot as he now is, the passers-by jeer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king who has conquered him.
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Warren W. Wiersbe, 50 People Every Christian Should Know | George Whitefield…turned the entire ministry over to Wesley and stepped aside as leader. “I have no party to be at the head of,” he wrote, “and through God’s grace I will have none; but as much as in me lies, I will strengthen the hands of all of every denomination that preach Jesus Christ in sincerity.”
When his followers protested his decision, he said, “Let my name be forgotten, let me be trodden under the feet of all men, if Jesus may thereby be glorified…. Let us look above names and parties; let Jesus be our all in all… I care not who is uppermost. I know my place… even to be the servant of all.
He sent a letter to the godly Lay Huntingdon in which he said, “Oh, that I may learn from all I see to desire to be nothing and to think it my highest privilege to be an assistant to all but the head of none.”
After visiting New England, George Whitefield wrote, “I am greatly persuaded that the generality of preachers talk of an unknown, unfelt Christ. And the reason why congregations have been so dead is because dead men preach to them.”
Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory | Plunge not yourselves too soon into controversies: For (1) It will be exceedingly to your loss, by diverting your souls from greater and more necessary things: you may get more increase of holiness, and spend your time more pleasingly to God, by drinking in deeper the substantials of religion, and improving them on your hearts and lives.
(2) It will corrupt your minds, and instead of humility, charity, holiness, and heavenly-mindedness, it will feed your pride, and kindle faction and a dividing zeal, and quench your charity, and possess you with a wrangling, contentious spirit, and you will make a religion of these sins and lamentable distempers.
(3) And it is the way to deceive and corrupt your judgments, and make you erroneous or heretical, to your own perdition and the disturbance of the church; for it is two to one, but either you presently err, or else get such an itch after notions and opinions that will lead you to error at the last. Because you are not yet ripe and able to judge of those things, till your minds are prepared by those truths that are first in order to be received. When you undertake a work that you cannot do, no wonder if it be ill done, and must be all undone again, or worse.
kcc.org.au writes: We are excited to announce that John Piper will be coming to speak at kcc events in August 2011. He will speak at engage as well as a public event and a pastors’ conference. Details of these and other events will be available later in 2010.
J.H. Thornwell, July 1846 | “Our whole system of operations gives an undue influence to money. Where money is the great want, numbers must be sought; and where an ambition for numbers prevails, doctrinal purity must be sacrificed. The root of the evil is the secular spirit of all our ecclesiastical institutions. What we want is a spiritual body; a Church whose power lies in the truth, and the presence of the Holy Ghost. To unsecularise the Church should be the unceasing aim of all who are anxious that the ways of Zion should flourish.”
“Because ‘heaven is a progressive state,’ the heavenly joy of the saints, and even of the triune God, will forever continue to increase…. Saints can look forward to an unending expansion of their knowledge and love of God, as their capacities are stretched by what they receive… there is no intrinsic limit to their joy in heaven…. As the saints continue to increase in knowledge and love of God, God receives more and more glory. This heavenly reciprocity will never cease, because the glory God deserves is infinite, and the capacity of the saints to perceive God’s glory and praise him for it is ever increasing.”
– Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards
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Abandoned by God - John MacArthur
