Of First Importance

“One day as I was passing into the field, this sentence fell upon my soul: ‘Thy righteousness is in heaven.’ And with the eyes of my soul I saw Jesus at the Father’s right hand. ‘There,’ I said, ‘is my righteousness!’ So that wherever I was or whatever I was doing, God could not say to me, ‘Where is your righteousness?’ For it is always right before him.

I saw that it is not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness IS Christ. Now my chains fell off indeed. My temptations fled away, and I lived sweetly at peace with God.

Now I could look from myself to him and could reckon that all my character was like the coins a rich man carries in his pocket when all his gold is safe in a trunk at home. Oh I saw that my gold was indeed in a trunk at home, in Christ my Lord. Now Christ was all: my righteousness, sanctification, redemption.”

- John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

“‘Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other!’ (Isaiah 45:22:)

But thou sayest sin will not let thee look. I tell thee, sin will be removed the moment thou dost look. ‘But I dare not; He will condemn me; I fear to look.’ He will condemn thee more, if thou dost not look. Fear, then, and look; but do not let thy fearing keep thee from looking. ‘But He will cast me out.’ Try Him. ‘ But I cannot see Him.’ I tell you, it is not seeing, but looking. ‘But my eyes are so fixed on the earth, so earthly, so worldly.’ Ah! but, poor soul, He giveth power to look and live. He saith - ‘Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.’”

- Charles Spurgeon, “Sovereignty and Salvation”

“Oh! sweet language of the precious blood of Jesus! If you have come to that blood once, you will come to it constantly… If thou hast ever come to the blood of sprinkling, thou wilt feel thy need of coming to it every day.”

- Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (Hendrickson Publishers, 1991), 216.

“The greatest thing that can be said of Jesus’ knowledge is that he knows God perfectly. He knows God perfectly, because he is God. We know God partially and imperfectly. Jesus knows him like no other being knows him. He knows him the way an omniscient person knows himself. ‘All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him‘ (Matthew 11:27). No one but Jesus knows the Father immediately, completely, and perfectly. Our knowledge of the Father depends wholly on Jesus’ gracious revelation; our knowledge is derivative and partial and, because of sin, imperfect.”

- John Piper, Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ (Wheaton, Il.: Crossway Books, 2001), 60.

“If you need proof that God is for you, look no further than the Cross. I cannot imagine what pain the Father must have experienced when he heard Jesus cry out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He forsook his own Son so that we might know him as Father and never be forsaken ourselves. What further demonstration do we need? That bloody form hung there on the Cross to make this eternal proclamation: ‘I AM FOR YOU!’”

- C.J. Mahaney, “This Great Salvation” in This Great Salvation (Gaithersburg, Md.: Sovereign Grace Ministries, 1992), 7-8.

“‘He hath done all things well.‘ Yes, from first to last, from our cradle to our grave, from the earliest pang of sin’s conviction to the latest thrill of sin’s forgiveness, from earth to heaven, this will be our testimony in all the way the Lord our God has led us in the wilderness. In providence and in grace, in every truth of His Word, in every lesson of His love, in every stroke of His rod, in every beam that has shone, and in every cloud that has shaded, in every element that has sweetened, and in every ingredient that has embittered, in all that has been mysterious, inscrutable, painful, and humiliating; in all that He gave, and in all that He took away, this testimony is His just due, and this our grateful acknowledgment through time and through eternity — ‘He hath done all things WELL.’”

- Octavius Winslow, The Sympathy of Christ (Harrisonburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1994), 48-49.

“It is the cross that gives God his credibility. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche (the nineteenth-century German philosopher) ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?

In the course of my travels I have entered a number of Buddhist temples in different Asian countries. I have stood respectfully before a statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing around his mouth, serene and silent, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time, after a while, I have had to turn away. And in my imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness.

The crucified one is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us, dying in our place in order that we might be forgiven. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross, which symbolizes divine suffering.”

- John Stott, Why I Am a Christian, 63