These then are the marks of the ideal Church - love, suffering, holiness, sound doctrine, genuineness, evangelism and humility. They are what Christ desires to find in His churches as He walks among them.
An unchurched christian is a grotesque anomaly. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God's new community.
When Jesus is truly our Lord, He directs our lives and we gladly obey Him. Indeed, we bring every part of our lives under His lordship - our home and family, our sexuality and marriage, our job or unemployment, our money and possessions, our ambitions and recreations.
The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice-and so the pain-of the cross.
The authority by which the Christian leader leads is not power but love, not force but example, not coercion but reasoned persuasion. Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.
The church is under orders. Evangelistic inactivity is disobedience.
In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?
Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.
The Christian life is not just our own private affair. If we have been born again into God's family, not only has he become our Father but every other Christian believer in the world, whatever his nation or denomination, has become our brother or sister in Christ. But it is no good supposing that membership of the universal Church of Christ is enough; we must belong to some local branch of it. Every Christian's place is in a local church. sharing in its worship, its fellowship, and its witness.
Persecution is simply the clash between two irreconcilable value-systems.
Pride is more than the first of the seven deadly sins; it is itself the essence of all sin.
Circumcision stands for a religion of human achievement, of what man can do by his own good works; Christ stands for a religion of divine achievement, of what God has done through the finished work of Christ.
No man preaches his sermon well to others if he does not first preach it to his own heart.
...The first and great evidence of our walking by the Spirit or being filled with the Spirit is not some private mystical experience of our own, but our practical relationships of love with other people.
Perhaps the transformation of the disciples of Jesus is the greatest evidence of all for the resurrection.
Because in no other person but the historic Jesus of Nazareth has God become man and lived a human life on earth, died to bear the penalty of our sins, and been raised from death and exalted to glory, there is no other Savior, for there is no other person who is qualified to save.
All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousn ess, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.
The reason I am a Christian is not that it is nice, but that it is true.
Faith, Hope & Love. Faith is directed towards God, love towards others (both within the Christian fellowship and beyond it) and hope towards the future, in particular, the glorious coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Similarly, faith rests of the past; love works in the present; hope looks to the future. Every Christian without exception is a believer, a lover and a hoper. Faith, hope and love are three sure evidences of regeneration by the Holy Spirit.
God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us.
The command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men... but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God.
If the first mark of a true and living church is love, the second is suffering. The one is naturally consequent on the other. A willingness to suffer proves the genuineness of love.
Prayer is the very way God Himself has chosen for us to express our conscious need of Him and our humble dependence on Him.
Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fiber of Christianity. Why is it that those who have no biblical convictions or theology to govern and direct their actions are tolerated and the standard or truth of God's Word rightly divided and applied is dismissed as extreme opinion or legalism?
The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought.
A Christian's freedom from anxiety is not due to some guaranteed freedom from trouble, but to the folly of worry and especially to the confidence that God is our Father, that even permitted suffering is within the orbit of His care.
We live and die; Christ died and lived!
Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and checkered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture .
All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God, because it is the adoration of His name.
Our Christian life began not with our decision to follow Christ but with God's call to us to do so.
It is impossible to pray for someone without loving him, and impossible to go on praying for him without discovering that our love for him grows and matures.
Many (Christians) have zeal without knowledge, enthusiasm without enlightenment. In more modern jargon, they are keen but clueless.
Saving faith is resting faith, the trust which relies entirely on the Savior.
The Bible isn’t about people trying to discover God, but about God reaching out to find us.
Christianity is in its very essence a resurrection religion. The concept of resurrection lies at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed.
When the Christian loses himself, he finds himself, he discovers his true identity.
Nothing is more important for mature Christian discipleship than a fresh, clear, true vision of the authentic Jesus.
We should not ask, ‘What is wrong with the world?’ for that diagnosis has already been given. Rather we should ask, “What has happened to salt and light?
There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God.
A man who loves his wife will love her letters and her photographs because they speak to him of her. So if we love the Lord Jesus, we shall love the Bible because it speaks to us of him.
I believe that to preach or to expound the scripture is to open up the inspired text with such faithfulness and sensitivity that God’s voice is heard and His people obey Him
The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of its worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified. So the community of the cross is a community of celebration, a eucharistic community, ceaselessly offering to God through Christ the sacrifice of our praise and thanksgiving. The Christian life is an unending festival. And the festival we keep, now that our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for us, is a joyful celebration of his sacrifice, together with a spiritual feasting upon it.
If we truly worship God, acknowledging and adoring his infinite worth, we find ourselves impelled to make him known to others, in order that they may worship him too. Thus worship leads to witness, and witness in its turn to worship, in a perpetual circle.
God intends us to penetrate the world. Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad. And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves? One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad. It cannot do anything else. The real question to ask is: Where is the salt?
Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.
The Christian's chief occupational hazards are depression and discouragement.
Simplicity is the first cousin of contentment.
Instead of inflicting upon us the judgment we deserved, God in Christ endured it in our place.
When we look at the cross we see the justice, love, wisdom and power of God. It is not easy to decide which is the most luminously revealed, whether the justice of God in judging sin, or the love of God in bearing the judgment in our place, or the wisdom of God in perfectly combining the two, or the power of God in saving those who believe. For the cross is equally an act, and therefore a demonstration, of God’s justice, love, wisdom and power. The cross assures us that this God is the reality within, behind and beyond the universe.
Never use a gallon of words to express a spoonful of thought. Our unadorned word should be enough.
Do not be content with a static Christian life. Determine rather to grow in faith and love, in knowledge and holiness.
Don't neglect your critical faculties. Remember that God is a rational God, who has made us in His own image. God invites and expects us to explore His double revelation, in nature and Scripture, with the minds He has given us, and to go on in the development of a Christian mind to apply His marvellous revealed truth to every aspect of the modern and post-modern world.
Faith is a reasoning trust, a trust which reckons thoughtfully and confidently upon the trustworthiness of God.
Although we have responsibilities to others, we are primarily accountable to God. It is before him that we stand, and to him that one day we must give an account. We should not therefore rate human opinion too highly.
We have the means of evangelizing our country, but they are slumbering in the pews of our churches.
What we need is not more learning, not more eloquence, not more persuasion, not more organization, but more power from the Holy Spirit.
The chief reason people do not know God is not because He hides from them but because they hide from Him.
We should travel light and live simply. Our enemy is not possessions but excess.
Apathy is the acceptance of the unacceptable.
The gospel is NOT preached if Christ is not preached.
Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his.
No man has ever appreciated the gospel until the law has first revealed him to himself. It is only against the inky blackness of the night sky that the stars begin to appear, and it is only against the dark background of sin and judgment that the gospel shines forth.
Do we claim to believe in God? He's a missionary God. You tell me you're committed to Christ. He's a missionary Christ. Are you filled with the Holy Spirit? He's a missionary Spirit. Do you belong to the church? It's a missionary society. And do you hope to go to heaven when you die? It's a heaven into which the fruits of world mission have been and will be gathered.
[Christian rebellion] arises from the doctrine of mankind made in the image of God, and therefore protests against all forms of dehumanization. It sets itself against the social injustices which insult God the Creator, seeks to protect human beings from oppression and longs to liberate them… it protests against every authoritarian regime, whether of the left or of the right, which discriminates against minorities, denies people their civil rights, forbids the free expression of opinions or imprisons people for their views alone.
Greatness in the kingdom of God is measured in terms of obedience.
God has clothed His thoughts in words, and there is no way to know Him except by knowing the Scriptures.
It is a great comfort to know that our judge will be none other than our savior.
Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, 'I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.' Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross.
The concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.
His authority on earth allows us to dare to go to all the nations. His authority in heaven gives us our only hope of success. And His presence with us leaves us with no other choice.
At every step of our Christian development and in every sphere of our Christian discipleship, pride is the greatest enemy and humility our greatest friend.
The essence of apostasy is changing sides from that of the crucified to that of the crucifier.
We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.
It is no exaggeration to say that without Scripture a Christian life is impossible.
Here's how to determine God's will for your life: Go wherever your gifts will be exploited the most.
Nobody can call himself a Christian who does not worship Jesus.
The symbol of the religion of Jesus is the cross, not the scales.
The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God's will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.
Moved by the perfection of His holy love, God in Christ substituted Himself for us sinners. That is the heart of the cross of Christ.
For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God [Gen. 3:1-7], while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man [2 Cor. 5:21]. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.
The chief occupational hazard of leadership is pride.
The major mark of justified believers is joy, especially joy in God himself. We should be the most positive people in the world. For the new community of Jesus Christ is characterized not by a self-centered triumphalism but by a God-centered worship.
The modern world detests authority but worships relevance. Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance, and that the secret of both is Jesus Christ
It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.
Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.
There is no Christianity without the cross. If the cross is not central to our religion, ours is not the religion of Jesus.
Good works are indispensable to salvation - not as its ground or means, however, but as its consequence and evidence.
A Christian should resemble a fruit tree with real fruit, not a Christmas tree with decorations tied on
The Cross is the blazing fire at which the flame of our love is kindled, but we have to get near enough for its sparks to fall on us.
The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ's achievement. The law makes demands and bids us obey; the gospel brings promises and bids us believe.
We need to repent of the haughty way in which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under its judgments instead. If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God's, then indeed he will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.
Christian giving is to be marked by self-sacrifice and self-forgetfuln ess, not by self-congratula tion.
The question is not so much what the hand is doing (passing over some cash or a check) but what the heart is thinking while the hand is doing it.
Faith's only function is to receive what grace offers.
The cross is not just a badge to identify us...it is also the compass which gives us our bearings in a disoriented world.
Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.
Lord Jesus, I pray that this day I may take up my cross and follow you.
Scripture is the royal scepter by which King Jesus rules his church
Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from His fruit, and no effective witness without His power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.
The nations are not gathered in automatically. If God has promised to bless "all the families of the earth," he has promised to do so "through Abraham's seed" (Genesis 12:3, 22:18). Now we are Abraham's seed by faith, and the earth's families will be blessed only if we go to them with the gospel. That is God's plain purpose.
Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony
Good conduct arises out of good doctrine.
The Spirit of God leads the people of God to submit to the Word of God.
Truth without love is too hard; love without truth is too soft.
At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgment we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God's holy love was 'satisfied.'
Grace is love that cares and stoops and rescues.
Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service. If we do not use the mind that God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riches of God’s grace.
Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it.
We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.
Word and worship belong indissolubly to each other. All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God, because it is the adoration of His name. Therefore, acceptable worship is impossible without preaching. For preaching is making known the name of the Lord, and worship is praising the name of the Lord made known.
As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.
Our claim is that God has revealed Himself by speaking; that this divine (or God-breathed) speech has been written down and preserved in Scripture; and that Scripture is, in fact, God's Word written, which therefore is true and reliable and has divine authority over men.
We are sent into the world, like Jesus, to serve. For this is the natural expression of our love for our neighbors. We love. We go. We serve.
Christians who neglect the Bible simply do not mature.
Ambitions for self may be quite modest. . . . Ambitions for God, however, if they are to be worthy, can never be modest. There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God. How can we ever be content that he should acquire just a little more honour in the world? No. Once we are clear that God is King, then we long to see him crowned with glory and honour, and accorded his true place, which is the supreme place. We become ambitious for the spread of his kingdom and righteousness everywhere.
The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of its worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified.
God continues to speak through what He has spoken.
... what I believe to be one of the major tragedies in the Church today. Namely, that evangelicals are biblical, but not contemporary, while liberals are contemporary but not biblical, and almost nobody is building bridges and relating the biblical text to the modern context
Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does he sustain it? Has he committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for his own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.
I have sometimes called this 'double listening'. Listening to the voice of God in Scripture, and listening to the voices of the modern world, with all their cries of anger, pain and despair.
Why is it that some Christians cross land and sea, continents and cultures, as missionaries? What on earth impels them? It is not in order to commend a civilization, an institution or an ideology, but rather a person, Jesus Christ, whom they believe to be unique.
The truth is that there are such things as Christian tears, and too few of us ever weep them.
The chief reason why the Christian believes in the divine origin of the Bible is that Jesus Christ Himself taught it.
Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.
We do not need to wait for the Holy Spirit to come: he came on the day of Pentecost. He has never left the church.
