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“Spiritual experience that does not arise from God’s word is not Christian experience. . . . Not all that passes for Christian experience is genuine. An authentic experience of the Spirit is an experience in response to the gospel. Through the Spirit the truth touches our hearts, and that truth moves our emotions and effects our wills.”
- Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church (Wheaton, Ill.; Crossway Books, 2008), 31.
“When Paul declared that God had become incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth and that this Jesus had been crucified and raised from the dead, he lost his audience. The Greeks could handle even the most bizarre speculation about divine beings as long as it was understood that all God-talk was the product of human imagination, the speculation of those who cannot really know the realm of the divine. But it was Christian certainty, the conviction that in Jesus God had crossed the line to become one with humankind, that simply could not tolerated. From their perspective, this was blatant nonsense.
The particularity of the Gospel has always been a stumbling block to people for whom dualism is a cardinal assumption. Treat Jesus as a great moral teacher, like Gandhi, and Christianity wins universal acclaim. If Jesus is presented as one of the world’s sources of wisdom, like Confucius, then he can be happily welcomed inside multiculturalism’s big tent. Offer Christianity as the product of a particular culture, and it will enjoy widespread respect.
Keep Christianity philosophical, teach it as a philosophy of life or the product of a particluar religious culture, and it gains instant acceptability as an honored part of the modern pantheon. But affirm the incarnation as fact rather than theory, as a event rather than a story, and watch the bonds of tolerance break. It is this particularity that Paul called “the scandal of the Gospel,’ and that ’stumbling block’ is no more tolerated in our day than in his.”
~Parker T. Williamson from Standing Firm: Reclaiming Christian Faith in Times of Controversy p.41
“Ah! believer, it is safer always for you to be led of the Spirit into gospel liberty than to wear legal fetters. Judge yourself at what Christ is rather than what you are. Satan will try to mar your peace by reminding you of your sinfulness and imperfections: you can only meet his accusations by faithfully adhering to the Gospel and refusing to wear the yoke of bondage.”
--Charles Spurgeon (Morning & Evening, September 6)
HT: Of First Importance
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To bless God for mercies–is the way to increase them; 
to bless Him for miseries–is the way to remove them.
Christ uncrowned Himself–to crown us!
He put off His robes–to put on our rags!
He came down from heaven–to keep us out of hell!
He fasted forty days–that He might feast us to all eternity!
He came from heaven to earth–that He might send us from earth to heaven!
There is no going to the fair haven of glory–without
sailing through the narrow strait of repentance.
by William Dyer
HT: Grace Gems
“There is no other solution to the marvellous mysteries of His Incarnation and Sacrificial Death but this: Christ has loved us.
There is not a circumstance of our Lord’s history which is not another form or manifestation of love.
His incarnation is love stooping.
His sympathy is love weeping.
His compassion is love supporting.
His grace is love acting.
His teaching is the voice of love.
His silence is the repose of love.
His patience is the restraint of love.
His obedience is the labor of love.
His suffering is the travail of love.
His cross is the altar of love.
His death is the burnt offering of love.
His resurrection is the triumph of love.
His ascension into heaven is the enthronement of love.
His sitting down at the right hand of God is the intercession of love.
Such is the deep, the vast, the boundless ocean of Christ’s love!”
~Octavius Winslow
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If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it.
Exodus 20:25
“God’s altar was to be built of unhewn stones, that no trace of human skill or labor might be seen on it. Human wisdom delights to trim and arrange the doctrines of the cross into a system more artificial and more congenial with the depraved tastes of fallen nature; however, instead of improving the gospel carnal wisdom pollutes it, until it becomes another gospel, and not the truth of God at all. All alterations and amendments of the Lord’s own Word are defilements and pollutions.
The proud heart of man is very anxious to have a hand in the justification of the soul before God; preparations for Christ are dreamed of, humblings and repentings are trusted in, good works are cried up, natural ability is much vaunted, and by all means the attempt is made to lift up human tools upon the divine altar. It were well if sinners would remember that so far from perfecting the Saviour’s work, their carnal confidences only pollute and dishonor it. The Lord alone must be exalted in the work of atonement, and not a single mark of man’s chisel or hammer will be endured.
There is an inherent blasphemy in seeking to add to what Christ Jesus in His dying moments declared to be finished, or to improve that in which the Lord Jehovah finds perfect satisfaction. Trembling sinner, away with your tools. Fall on your knees in humble supplication. Accept the Lord Jesus to be the altar of your atonement, and rest in Him alone.” {emphasis mine}
~Charles Spurgeon, Morning by Morning
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From: Letters of John Newton
“In order that Satan might not outwit us. For we are very familiar with his evil schemes.”
2 Corinthians 2:11
Satan knows knows how to suit his temptations to our personal tempers and circumstances. And if, like Achilles, you have a vulnerable heel–the old serpent will be sure to strike there!
“Put on all of God’s armor so that you will be able to stand firm against all strategies and tricks of the Devil.”
Ephesians 6:11
HT: Grace Gem
“The atoning death of Christ, and that alone, has presented sinners as righteous in God’s sight; the Lord Jesus has paid the full penalty of their sins, and clothed them with His perfect righteousness before the judgment seat of God.
But Christ has done for Christians even far more than that. He has given to them not only a new and right relation to God, but a new life in God’s presence for evermore. He has saved them from the power as well as from the guilt of sin.
The New Testament does not end with the death of Christ; it does not end with the triumphant words of Jesus on the Cross, “It is finished.” The death was followed by the resurrection, and the resurrection like the death was for our sakes.
Jesus rose from the dead into a new life of glory and power, and into that life He brings those for whom He died. The Christian, on the basis of Christ’s redeeming work, not only has died unto sin, but also lives unto God.”
—J. Gresham Machen, Christianity & Liberalism
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“The redeemed have all their objective good in God. God himself is the great good which they are brought to the possession and enjoyment of by redemption. He is the highest good, and the sum of all that good which Christ has purchased. God is the inheritance of the saints; he is the portion of their souls. God is their wealth and treasure, their food, their life, their dwelling place, their ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honor and glory. They have none in heaven but God; he is the great good which the redeemed are received to at death, and which they are to rise to at the end of the world.
The Lord God, he is the light of the heavenly Jerusalem; and is the ‘the river of the water of life’ that runs, and the tree of life that grows, ‘in the midst of the paradise of God.’ The glorious excellencies and beauty of God will be what will forever entertain the minds of the saints, and the love of God will be their everlasting feast. The redeemed will indeed enjoy other things; they will enjoy the angels, and will enjoy one another: but that which they shall enjoy in the angels, or each other, or in anything else whatsoever, that will yield them delight and happiness, will be what will be seen of God in them.
~Jonathan Edwards from “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption,” in The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, et al (1999)
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We will never be worthy of heaven or of His love. That sense of self-worth that so many Christian leaders, deceived by Christian psychology, are attempting to foster among the redeemed, would ruin heaven by turning some of the attention and glory from God and the Lamb to ourselves. We will always be creatures and He the Creator; we will always be sinners saved by grace and bought with His blood, and He will ever be our glorious Savior. Because His infinite love for us has filled us with love for Him, our passion for eternity will ever be to see Him exalted and praised and to love Him with all the capacity He supplies. His eternal joy will be to bless us with Himself. Such will be the wonder and ecstasy of heaven.
God desires to have us in His presence even more than we could ever desire to be there. He loves us with a love that will never let us go. And because He has captured our affection, we will be eternally bound by love to Him–a love that not only flows to us from God, but which our redeemed hearts will return to Him with a purity and heavenly joy that will be to His eternal glory.
–excerpt from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith – by Dave Hunt
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