Faith

"The existence of faith does not depend upon intellectual distinctions" (Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 18).

Bible Intake and Application

"I've known people in as many as six Bible studies per week who grew only in knowledge but not in Christlikeness because they were not applying what they were learning. Their prayer life wasn't strong, they weren't influencing lost people with the gospel, their family life was strained. If we will begin to discipline ourselves to determine at least one specific response to the text before walking away from it [Whitney is referring to devotional Bible reading/Bible intake], we will much more rapidly grow in grace. Without this kind of application, we aren't doers of God's Word" (Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, 61).

Whitney makes a great point about the pro-active approach to reading one's Bible in private devotions. But the point he makes is just as applicable to the Lord's Service, which occurs one day in seven.

A sermon should be both thought provoking and convicting enough for one to dwell and meditate on its message the other six days of the week. But meditating for six days on one sermon takes discipline, it takes a pro-active response to hearing God's Word.

Duties and Events

"Providence," wrote the seraphic Samuel Rutherford, "hath a thousand keys to open a thousand sundry doors for the deliverance of his own, when it is even come to a conclamatum est ["when it is all over with us"]. Let us be faithful, and care for our own part, which is to do and suffer for Him, and lay Christ's part on Himself, and leave it there. Duties are ours, events are the Lord's." The Lord will establish His kingdom in His own time and in His own way. Our task is that of obedience to His revealed word and will (Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Communicator's Commentary Series, Vol. 19: Daniel, 80-81). 

Human Solidarity

"Solidarity works for good and for evil. It is scarcely necessary to be reminded of the beneficent influences which have emanated from its application in the realm of grace. Redemption in its design, accomplishment, application, and consummation is fashioned in terms of this principle. And in the realm of evil it is a fact of revelation and of observation that God visits "the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate" him (Exod. 20:5)" (John Murray, The Imputation of Adam's Sin, 22).

Truth is Jesus Christ

"Jesus told those who believed in him: "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (John 8:31-32). He also said to them, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). Note that being formed as a disciple is prior to knowing the truth. As we submit to discipleship, we learn to be people who are truthful. Truth is not a set of propositions about the world; rather, truth is Jesus Christ. We know truth by coming to know this person and we know this person by learning to pray as he taught us" (William H. Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, Lord, Teach Us: The Lord's Prayer and the Christian Life, 16).

Christian Education, Again

"We don't start with the state's curriculum, and then attempt to find a Bible passage to justify each part. Rather, we start with the Bible and go from there, learning evermore of who God is, of what he has done, and of what he requires of us" (R.C. Sproul Jr., When You Rise Up: A Covenantal Approach to Homeschooling, 96).

Christian Education, Again

"Changed hearts is the goal, the function, the very purpose of education" (R.C. Sproul Jr., When You Rise Up: A Covenantal Approach to Homeschooling, 29).

Christian Education, Again

"In simplest form, the covenant God has made with man is simply this: Love, trust, and obey God . . . and teach your children to do the same. And to take it one step further, we haven't taught our children to do the same unless or until we have taught them to teach their children" (R.C. Sproul Jr., When You Rise Up: A Covenantal Approach to Homeschooling, 26).

Christian Education

"Thinking that education is something different from discipling our children is a sure sign that we have been "educated" by the state. Education is discipleship" (R.C. Sproul Jr., When You Rise Up: A Covenantal Approach to Homeschooling, 21).

"No Naked, Simple Gospel"

"There really is no naked, simple gospel. It must be spoken in human language and argued carefully" (From the "Foreword" by William Edgar in K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith, 13).

Preaching Law and Gospel

"Through the preaching of the law, the Holy Spirit slays us, leaving us utterly destitute and helpless to save ourselves, and through the preaching of the gospel, he raises us up and seats us with Christ in heavenly places" (Michael Horton, A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship, 66).

Kuyper on The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Methodism

From the "Preface" to Kuyper's 1899 edition of The Work of the Holy Spirit:

Methodism was born out of the spiritual decline of the Episcopal Church of England and Wales. It arose as the reaction of the individual and of the spiritual subjective against the destructive power of the objective in the community as manifested in the Church of England. As such the reaction was precious and undoubtedly a gift of God, and in its workings it would have continued just as salutary if it had retained its character of a predominant reaction. It should have supposed the Church as a community as an objective power, and in this objective domain it should have vindicated the significance of the individual spiritual life and of subjective confessing [Emphasis CCS]. 

But it failed to do this. From vindicating the subjective rights of the individual it soon passed into antagonism against the objective rights of the community. This resulted dogmatically in the controversy about the objective work of God, viz., in His decree and His election, and ecclesiastically in antagonism against the object work of the office through confession. It gave supremacy to the subjective element in man's free will and to the individual element in the deciding of unchurchly conflicts in the Church. And so it retained no other aim than the conversion of individual sinners; and for this work it abandoned the organic, and retained only the mechanical method. 

  . . .

The Work of the Holy Spirit may not be displaced by the activity of the human spirit (Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, xiii-xiv).

Quotes from Perelandra, Again

A lengthy one, but beautiful.

At this point it becomes increasingly difficult to give Ransom's experiences in any certain form. How long he lay beside the river at the cavern mouth eating and sleeping and waking only to eat and sleep again, he has no idea. He thinks it was only a day or two, but from the state of his body when this period of convalescence ended I should imagine it must have been more like a fortnight or three weeks. It was a time to be remembered only in dreams as we remember infancy. Indeed it was a second infancy, in which he was breast-fed by the planet Venus herself: unweaned till he moved from that place. Three impressions of this long Sabbath remain. One is the endless sound of rejoicing water. Another is the delicious life that he sucked from the clusters which almost seemed to bow themselves unmasked into his outstretched hands. The third is the song. Now high in air above him, now welling up as if from glens and valleys far below, it floated through his sleep and was the first sound at every waking. It was formless as the song of a bird, yet it was not a bird's voice. As a bird's voice is to a flute, so this was to a cello: low and ripe and tender, full-bellied, rich and golden-brown: passionate too, but not with the passions of men" (C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, 185).

Christian Education, Again

"Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Wesley -- all were men of high education who loved learning and used their minds until their work was done. Study the great turning points of Christian history, and in every case you will find behind them solid learning used to the glory of God. With all due honor to Moody and Spurgeon, who lacked formal education but who valued it so highly that they both founded schools, we must acknowledge that Christian history has in the main been made by men of the highest intellectual attainment" (Frank E. Gaebelein, The Pattern of God's Truth: Problems of Integration in Christian Education, 105-106).

Christian Education

"Only a small minority of Protestant youth are receiving elementary and secondary education with a genuinely Christian integration. The vast majority are in public schools, where a consistent Christian world view cannot be imparted, however good the emphasis upon conduct and character may be. To be sure, in some cases a strongly Christian home and a church with a vital educational program may supply the lack; yet the tide of secularism in American has risen so high that it is difficult to give children in their impressionable years a thorough-going Christian view of life" (Frank E. Gaebelein, The Pattern of God's Truth: Problems of Integration in Christian Education, 111).

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That originally published in 1954. It is as applicable today (if not more so) as it was then.

Three Quotes from Perelandra

"This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself -- perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film" (C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, 48).

"How can we not obey what we love?" (116)

"Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places" (140).

Chinese Calvinism

An interesting article about how Calvinism is flourishing in China, of all places.