The sinner is not just bad, he’s DEAD!
He doesn’t need help, he needs LIFE!
Jesus did not come into the world to essentially make bad men good, he came into the world to make dead men LIVE!
The bucket, if we would have it filled with the ocean, must first be empty.
God strengthens those that are weak in their own feeling and sense of their own nothingness.
—Puritan Thomas Manton, Works 6:274
The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn't stayed put and all has to be done over again.
C. S. Lewis, June 1960 letter
"The devil's constant strategy is to seek to merge the church and the world so that the people of God lose their distinctiveness and be no longer as 'a city set upon a hill.' The primary way of Satan to achieve this is to confuse what it means to be a Christian." -Iain Murray.
“The kind of God we believe in determines the kind of sermons we preach. The essential secret is not mastering certain techniques but being mastered by certain convictions. In other words, theology is more important that methodology.”
- John Stott
“Bad times! Troublesome times! This men are saying. Let our lives be good; and the times are good. We make our times; such as we are, such are the times.”
— Saint Augustine
If you’re leading people, Numbers 11–14 shows 5 hard realities you’re going to face whether you like it or not.
This is what leadership actually feels like.
The Burden of Leadership 🧵
The truth is that Irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.
“We've come to the point where, from repeated brainwashings, the unfortunate Christians think not only that they're the most contemptible bastards in history — this has been the case for a long time — but also the biggest imbeciles, which until recently they still weren't quite sure about. We have to give them back a little of the pride that they once possessed, in overly large quantities, no doubt, but that they've replaced with a dreadful inferiority complex, a terrible defeatism that has nothing to do with Christian humility.”
— René Girard
Underappreciated line in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy:
WE AFFIRM that God's revelation within the Holy Scriptures was progressive.
WE DENY that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revelation, ever CORRECTS or CONTRADICTS it. (Article V).
“Anything that flatters me in my preaching of the gospel will result in making me a traitor to Jesus, and I prevent the creative power of His redemption from doing its work.”
- Oswald Chambers