“When someone sets his affections upon the cross and the love of Christ, he crucifies the world as a dead and undesirable thing. The baits of sin lose their attraction and disappear. Fill your affections with the cross of Christ and you will find no room for sin.”
- John Owen, quoted by C. J. Mahaney in Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2008), 34.
“To speak of sin by itself, to speak of it apart from the realities of creation and grace, is to forget the resolve of God. God wants shalom and will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.
Moreover, to speak of sin by itself is to misunderstand its nature: sin is only a parasite, a vandal, a spoiler. Sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. To concentrate on our rebellion, defection and folly — to say to the world, ‘I have some bad news and I have some bad news’ — is to forget that the center of the Christian religion is not our sin but our Savior.
To speak of sin without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and the hope of shalom.”
- Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, 199
“Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.”
—J.I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: 1993), 214
“There is nothing that you may not in the confidence of love, and in the simplicity of faith, tell Jesus—no temporal need—no spiritual sorrow. “Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.” “You people, pour out your heart before Him!” Tell Him your desolateness as a widow—your friendlessness as an orphan—your sadness and solitude as one whose heart is overwhelmed within you. Go, and lose yourself in the love of Jesus—hide in the wounds of Jesus—wash in the blood of Jesus—replenish from the fullness of Jesus, and recline upon the bosom of Jesus.
Think not this a weak, sentimental Christianity to which we are urging you. We know no other than this—no other which so appeals to the intellect, as to the most sacred feelings and affections of the heart. This telling Jesus everything in our individual history—this recognition of His government in all our ways, and this reliance upon His power and love in all our circumstances—is the legitimate employment of a faith at once the most sublime exercise of the mind as it is the loveliest and holiest impulse of the heart.”
- Octavius Winslow, Go and Tell Jesus
“One thing is past all question; we shall bring our Lord most glory if we get from Him much grace.”
- Charles Spurgeon, An All-Around Ministry
(HT: Justin Taylor)
“There is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. . . . This is not true of us only when we believe. It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ doesn’t cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behavior may be. It is always on His ‘blood and righteousness’ alone that we can rest.”
- B. B. Warfield, quoted by Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson in Counsel from the Cross(Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2009), 19.
“It’s no wonder that self-help books top the charts in Christian publishing and that counseling offices are overwhelmed. Our pride and our neglect of the gospel force us to run from seminar to seminar, book to book, counselor to counselor, always seeking but never finding some secret to holy living.
Most of us have never really understood that Christianity is not a self-help religion meant to enable moral people to become more moral. We don’t need a self-help book; we need a Savior. We don’t need to get our collective act together; we need death and resurrection and the life-transforming truths of the gospel. And we don’t need them just once, at the beginning of our Christian life; we need them every moment of every day.”
- Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson, Counsel from the Cross (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2009), 30.
