From EBC
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. . . . And . . . pretty much anything . . . you worship will eat you alive.
– David Foster Wallace
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
– C. S. Lewis
To reconcile offending man,
Make Justice drop her angry rod;
What creature could have formed the plan,
Or who fulfill it but a God?
No drop remains of all the curse,
For wretches who deserved the whole;
No arrows dipped in wrath to pierce
The guilty, but returning soul.
Peace by such means so dearly bought,
What rebel could have hoped to see?
Peace by his injured Sovereign wrought,
His Sovereign fastened to a tree.
– William Cowper
Question 33: What is justification?
Answer: Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.
– Westminster Shorter Catechism
Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, in all your troubles and darkness, remember what you are and have. You have been loved with an everlasting love. You are supported by everlasting arms.
You are recipients of everlasting life and heirs of an everlasting kingdom, all sealed and made sure by the blood of an everlasting covenant.
Amen.
— Dale Ralph Davis
The love of Christ! . . . It is like the blue sky into which you may see clearly, but the real vastness of which you cannot measure. It is like the deep, deep sea, into [which] you can look a little way, but its depths are unfathomable. It has a breadth without a bound, length without end, height without top, and depth without bottom.
—Robert Murray M’Cheyne
Never mind that bread and wine, unless you can use them as folks often use their spectacles. What do they use them for? To look at? No, to look through them. So, use the bread and wine as a pair of spectacles. Look through them, and do not be satisfied until you can say, “Yes, yes, I can see the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”
– C. H. Spurgeon
The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.
– Tertullian
People who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives … and when the bubble has burst, they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted.
– Nate Saint, missionary martyr to Ecuador
The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not try to pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and when they’ve grown, they will pollute the shadows.
– N. D. Wilson
The love of Christ is rich and free;
Fixed on his own eternally;
Nor earth, nor hell, can it remove;
Long as he lives his own he’ll love.
– William Gadsby
If the Bible is telling us the truth about reality, then the universe we live in was created primarily with marital romance in mind. The heavens and the earth were created for the marriage of Adam and Eve. The new heavens and the new earth will be created for the marriage of Christ and his bride. The whole of cosmic reality exists as the venue for the eternal honeymoon of the perfect husband with his perfect bride in marital bliss forever and ever. This is the breathtaking claim of the Bible. There is more at stake in marriage than we ever could have known, without the mystery revealed in the Christian gospel (Eph. 5:32).
— Ray Ortlund
Christian singleness is a testimony to the supreme sufficiency of Christ for all things, testifying that through Christ life is fully blessed, even without marriage and children. It prophetically points to reality greater than the satisfaction of the present age by consciously anticipating the Christian’s eternal inheritance and the kingdom of God. Christian singleness lived as a testimony of this gospel truth is a redeeming singleness.
— Barry Danylak
Genesis affirms a balance of sameness and difference between the sexes. This is a delicate balance that is difficult, but necessary, to maintain. Most theories of gender lose this balance, veering into extremes of uniformity (men and women are interchangeable) or polarity (men are from Mars, women are from Venus). Both extremes lose the fruitful tension expressed here in Genesis…. [The] origin story of sexual difference [between men and women] proclaims that our identities as men and women matter; they carry sacred significance and occupy a prominent place in this worldview.
— Abigail Favale
The Lord puts a special honour upon baptism, and it would be ill for us to neglect that which he so evidently esteems. Do not make any mistake, and imagine that immersion in water can wash away sin; but do remember that if the Lord puts this outward profession side by side with the washing away of sins it is not a trifling matter.
— C. H. Spurgeon
The Father is pleased with us because we are united to His Son. United to Christ, the Father loves us as He loves His Son and accepts us completely and unreservedly.
— Michael Barrett
The central basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us.
— Tim Keller
The gospel is a glorious declaration of the mighty acts of God when he invaded this earth in the person of his eternal Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
— John Blanchard
We are to consider, that though Christ is greatly exalted, yet he is exalted, not as a private person for himself only, but as his people's head; he is exalted in their name, and upon their account, as the first fruits, and as representing the whole harvest. He is not exalted that he may be at a greater distance from them, but that they may be exalted with him.
— Jonathan Edwards
Unbelief is the root of evil and the essence of evil. All our sinning grows out of unbelief in the living God and what He has said to us in Scripture.
— John Piper
