Knowledge of God Teaches Us To Pray

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Matt Jury under D. A. Carson

The more we reflect on the kind of God who is there, the kind of God who has disclosed himself in Scripture and supremely in Jesus Christ, the kind of God who has revealed his plans and purposes for his own “household,” the kind of God who hears and answers prayer — the more we shall be encouraged to pray. Prayerlessness is often an index to our ignorance of God. Real and vital knowledge of God not only teaches us what to pray, but gives us powerful incentive to pray.

D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 201.

All Talk and No Action

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Matt Jury under G. Campbell Morgan

The man who nurses his orthodoxy, and does nothing for God, is a liar and a hypocrite.

G. Campbell Morgan, Living Messages of the Books of the Bible (Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1912), 265

Glimpsing the Blinding Glory of the Holiness of God

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Matt Jury under John R. W. Stott

All inadequate doctrines of the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of God and humanity. If we bring got down to our level and raise ourselves to his, then of course we see no need for a radical salvation, let alone for a radical atonement to secure it. When, on the other hand, we have glimpsed the blinding glory of the holiness of God and have been so convicted of our sin by the Holy Spirit that we trouble before God and acknowledge what we are, namely “hell-deserving sinners,” then and only then does the necessity of the Cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it before.

John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 111.

When Unity Is Not Unity

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Matt Jury under D. Martin Lloyd-Jones

If you go back through the long history of the Church, you will find that it has often counted most, and has been most used by God, when there have been just a handful of people who were agreed in spirit and in doctrine. God took hold of them and used them and did mighty things through them. But when there was only one Church in the whole of western Europe, what did she lead to? The Dark Ages. And yet it seems to me that this great lesson of history is being entirely forgotten and ignored at this present time. I say these things not because I am animated by any controversial spirit, but because I have a zeal for the truth as I find it in the Scriptures, and regard it as tragic to note the way in which Scripture is being twisted and perverted in the interests of a unity which is not a unity.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Great Doctrines of the Bible – The Church

HT: Reformed Quotes

Doctrine Is Useless without Holiness

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Matt Jury under J. C. Ryle

Sound Protestant and evangelical doctrine is useless if it is not accompanied by a holy life. It is worse than useless: it does positive harm. It is despised by keen sighted and shrewd men of the world, as an unreal and hollow thing, and brings religion into contempt.

J. C. Ryle, Holiness (Carlisle, PA: EP Books, 2011), xvii.

Loving Theology More Than God

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Matt Jury under Paul Tripp

Bad things happen when maturity is more defined by knowing than it is by being. Danger is afloat when you come to love the ideas more than the God whom they represent and the people they are meant to free.

Paul David Tripp, Dangerous Calling (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 42.

Perceiving God’s Incomprehensibility

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Matt Jury under Herman Bavinck

If God cannot be known, neither can he be felt or experienced in any way. All religion is then empty. But modern philosophical agnosticism makes the same error as ancient Gnosticism. By reducing God to “inexpressible depth” and “eternal silence,” they make the universe godless, in the most absolute sense of the word. What it all comes down to is whether God has willed and found a way to reveal himself in the domain of creatures. This, the Christian church and Christian theology affirm, has indeed occurred. Thanks to revelation, we have a true knowledge of God, knowledge that is relative and finite rather than comprehensive. Incomprehensibility does not imply agnosticism but an ingredient of the Christian claim to have received by revelation a specific, limited, yet well-defined and true knowledge of God. In the words of Basil, “The knowledge of God consists in the perception of his incomprehensibility.

Herman Bavinck (1854-1921)

HT: The Old Guys