Friday, May 29, 2009

"Living Faith" - Samuel Ward

“Faith is to be put to use! This is the chief mystery of our spiritual life. Stir up your soul in this mountain to talk with Christ. Consider all the promises and privileges you regularly enjoy. Now actually think of them, roll them under your tongue, chew on them until you fell their sweetness in the palate of your soul. View them together and individually. Sometimes contemplate one in particular or another more deeply.Consider how wonderful it is that you debts have been cancelled, and that the wrath of God has been satisfied. Consider how happy and safe a condition you are in by being a son of God, and how pleasant a state not to fear death and hell. Consider how stately a thing it is to be an heir of glory. Mingle these thoughts with your prayers to heaven for grace and aid. Do not leave the mountain until your heart has been cheerfully warmed and revived in strength for the next day.This is using your faith. It is living by faith. You will find your soul saying, with good reason, ‘It is good to be here.’ It is good to be here daily, to come here often!...Let a man diligently and thoroughly make use of his faith and it will become great, and great will be the joy that it will bring to him.”

- Samuel Ward, Living Faith

Thursday, May 28, 2009

"Presenting the Gospel" - John Stott

"In our evangelistic proclamation we must address the whole person (mind, heart and will) with the whole gospel (Christ incarnate, crucified, risen, reigning, coming again, and much else besides). We shall argue with his mind and plead with his heart in order to move his will, and we shall put our trust in the Holy Spirit throughout. We have no liberty to present a partial Christ (man but not God, his life but not his death, his cross but not his resurrection, the Savior but not the Lord). Nor have we any liberty to ask for a partial response (mind but not heart, heart but not mind, or either without the will). No. Our objective is to win a total man for a total Christ, and this will require the full consent of his mind and heart and will."

- John R. W. Stott, Your Mind Matters

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

"Faith: Illogical Belief in the Improbable?" - John R. W. Stott

“Thus faith and thought belong together, and believing is impossible without thinking.
Dr. Lloyd Jones has given us an excellent New Testament example of this truth while commenting on Matthew 6:30 in his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount: "But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?"

"Faith according to our Lord's teaching in this paragraph, is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him... We must spend more time in studying our Lord's lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them....Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry... That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think."

- John R. W. Stott, Your Mind Matters
- D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960) , II, 129-30

Monday, May 25, 2009

"Scripture Alone: Sufficient for Guidance" - James Montgomery Boice

“Not long ago one of my staff gave me a script to be used for an imagined “evangelical psychiatric hotline,” the kind of recorded message one might hear when he or she calls a participating church for psychiatric help. It went like this:

If you are obsessive-compulsive, please press 1 repeatedly.
If you are codependent, please ask someone else to press 2.
If you have multiple personalities, please press 3, 4, 5, and 6.
If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want.
Just stay on the line so we can trace the call.
If you are evangelical, listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press.

Is that how we are to find guidance from God for our lives? A little voice? Not at all. That is a kind of mysticism. “I prayed about it, and God told me to do the following.” In former days, a statement like that would be followed by a more mature believer asking for “chapter and verse,” meaning, where do you find that in Scripture? We need to get rid of that way of talking and of such false claims.

God has given us all the guidance we need in the Bible. So if there is something we want or think we need that is not in the Bible – What job shall I take? Where shall I live? Whom shall I marry? – after having prayed for God’s providential guidance, we are free to do whatever seems right to us, knowing that God who cares for us always will certainly keep us in His way. In areas about which the Bible does not speak explicitly, we are free to act as we think best, as long as we are obeying God and trying to live a godly life.”

- James Montgomery Boice, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace?, Scripture Alone: Sufficient for Guidance

Thursday, May 7, 2009

"Your Personal Salvation" by C.H. Spurgeon

“Ah, my careless hearer, I wish you were in the same plight as I was in once, when I was burdened with a sense of my transgressions. If you felt as I did, you would catch at that word “grace” right eagerly, and be delighted with the promise made to “faith.” You would make up your mind that if prophets searched out salvation, if apostles reported it, if angels longed to know it, you yourself would find it, or perish in searching after it. Do you forget that you must have eternal life, or you are undone forever? Do not trifle with your eternal interests! Do not be careless where earth and heaven are in earnest! Prophets, apostles, angels, all beckon you to seek the Lord. Awake, thou that sleepest. Arise, O sluggish soul! A thousand voices call thee to bestir thyself, and receive the grace which has come unto thee.”

- "Your Personal Salvation" by C.H. Spurgeon

http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols25-27/chs1524.pdf