Category: Quotes to Note

noteworthy quotes

Quotes to Note 6: Following Christ As a Helpless Child

~ fundyreformed ~ 2 Comments

The last several months, I’ve been enjoying Tabletalk, a monthly devotional magazine from R.C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries. There’s a daily reading relevant to a specific passage, a bible reading plan, and several articles related to a specific theme for the month.

This month, the theme is resolutions. And Stephen Nichols, the author of Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought, contributed an article on Jonathan Edwards’ famous resolutions. In that article he mentioned a letter with 19 points that Edwards addressed to a teenager who had asked for advice on how to live the Christian life. From that letter comes the quote for today’s quote to note. I hope it blesses you as it did me.

In all your course, walk with God and follow Christ as a little, poor, helpless child, taking hold of Christ’s hand, keeping your eye on the mark of the wounds on his hand and side.

May God grant that we all have such a humble trust in Christ this year, and may we draw closer to our Savior.

Quotes to Note 5: Earning God’s Mercy

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

I am currently reading Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ from All the Scriptures by Dennis E. Johnson. The good folks at Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing kindly supplied me with a review copy.

In a chapter contrasting different approaches to preaching, Johnson picks Tim Keller’s preaching style as exemplary of his ideal view. What distinguishes that style is primarily that the gospel is preached to both saved and unsaved alike in the congregation. Johnson describes this view as follows:

What both the unbeliever and the believer need to hear in preaching is the gospel, with its implications for a life lived in confident gratitude in response to amazing grace. Christians are constantly tempted to relapse into legalistic attitudes in their pursuit of sanctification…. We need to repent not only of our sins but also of our righteousness–our efforts at self-atonement in lieu of surrender to the all-sufficient grace of Christ.

Johnson then points out that Keller traces his discover of the need of “two-fold repentance” to George Whitefield’s sermon, “The Method of Grace”. In the footnotes, Johnson provides the following quote from that sermon. This is the quote that arrested me and I pray will impact you as well.

When a poor soul is somewhat awakened by the terrors of the Lord, then the poor creature, being born under the covenant of works, flies directly to a covenant of works again. And as Adam and Eve hid themselves… and sewed fig leaves… so the poor sinner, when awakened, flies to his duties and to his performances, to hide himself from God, and goes to patch up a righteousness of his own. Says he, I will be mighty good now–I will reform–I will do all I can; and then certainly Jesus Christ will have mercy on me.

I found Whitefield’s sermon available online here. If you have some time, you may be blessed by reading the entire sermon.

To get your own copy of this great book on redemptive-historical, gospel-centered preaching, compare prices at Amazon.com with the Christian bookseller Westminster Bookstore. The quotes above are from pages 55-57 of my copy.

Quotes to Note 4: The Bible is Truth

~ fundyreformed ~ 12 Comments

I subscribe to Table Talk, a monthly devotional published by R.C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries. Each month the magazine focuses on a theme, and this month that theme is “The Canonicity of Scripture”.

In the openeing column, Burk Parsons, the editor, captures the gist of the issue. The Bible is the Word of God, and canonization was simply the church receiving God’s Word as His Word. Canonization was not a process whereby the Church invented Holy Scriptures. Here’s how Buck said it:

The Bible is not a cleverly contrived collection of fanciful tales of mythical gods and prophets, sorcerers and goblins, hobbits and elves. It is not a Judeo-Christian anthology of sixty-six ancient books that were deemed politically and ecclesiastically correct by influential Christians of the early church who coveted worldly acceptance and prestige. On the contrary, the Bible is the book of the Lord God Almighty. It is the authoritative, inerrant, and infallible Word of God, and, as Jesus taught us in His prayer to the Father: His “Word is truth.” It doesn’t merely contain truth or speak about truth; it is truth “” it defines truth (John 17:17). We must, therefore, regard it as such.

Go on and read Buck’s entire article. Some of the other columns are also available online here.

Quotes to Note 3: Luther’s Fear of God

~ Bob Hayton ~ 4 Comments

I have one final quote to share from The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul. I recommend the book as a great God-focused book on what God’s holiness really is and how it should impact us.

Sproul spends some time discussing Martin Luther, and highlights an instance when he was to offer his first Mass. This is before Luther was converted, but it shows how clearly Luther was aware of God’s holiness and the true terror that this holiness should work in man. Luther was unable to give the mass, and could not speak. He was paralyzed when he got to the point when he was supposed to say the words, “We offer unto thee, the living, the true, the eternal God.” Luther explains why this caused him to be speechless in the following few lines. Would we all were so keenly aware of God’s majesty and our sin.

At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, “With what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable litle pygmy, say ‘I want this, I ask for that’? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and the true God.” [Holiness of God, pg. 107 (Wheaton: 1985); quote was taken from (Roland Bainton, Here I Stand (NAL, 1978)]

Praise God that we have a mediator, one Jesus Christ to take our place and allow us to approach the great and Mighty God. How truly amazing is God’s grace.

Quotes to Note 2: The Importance of Wicked Step-mothers

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

I recently added a books widget from GuruLib (check out my “Books I’m Reading” section in my sidebar). And one of the books I note that I’m reading is Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward. I heard about the book from Justin Taylor’s blog, and the few pages I’ve read so far are fascinating.

In starting this book, I stumbled over a quote which has grabbed my attention. As a father of four daughters, the oldest being 4 (and a half), and as one who enjoys a good tale, I found this quote equally insightful and inspiring. It is from the contemporary British philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre from his book After Virtue:

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. ¹

What do you think? I think he is making an important point, and stories are more important than we realize.

 ¹ Ward quotes a portion of this quote on pg. 3 in his book citing After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1985), pg. 216. My longer quote comes from a chapter by MacIntyre entitled “The Virtues, The Unity of a Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition” in the book Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences edited by Lewis and Sandra Hinchman (State University of New York Press: 1997) found with Google Book Search.