And it is a mercy to have so near a friend to be a helper to your soul; to join with you in prayer and other holy exercises; to watch over you and tell you of your sins and dangers, and to stir up in you the grace of God, and remember to you of the life to come, and cheerfully accompany you in the ways of holiness.Richard Baxter,A Christian Directoiy: or, Sum ofPractical7heology, and Cases of Conscience, 11.1 (7he Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter [London: James Duncan, 1830], IV, 30).
I take occasion to make the general remark that the great thing I always desired to find was a woman who was a real Christian, who was a real lady, and who was not a fool.AutoBiography (73)
With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, non-universal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones. Knowing God (The Love of God, 130)
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.
God ordains our prayers as means of receiving what he plans to give, all to enrich our relationship to him. As the perfect Father of his children, he reserves the right to answer the requests we should have made rather than those we actually made when we have asked for the wrong thing; but he will take action one way or another in every situation of need that we bring before him. Systematic Theology A Lecture
The Supper is rightly viewed as a means of grace. The efficacy of the sacraments ...resides not in the faith or virtue of the minister but in the faithfulness of God. As the preaching of the Word makes the gospel audible, so the sacraments make it visible, and the Holy Spirit stirs up faith by both means.
Tom Wright foregrounds what the Bible backgrounds, and backgrounds what the Bible foregrounds, but Wright does more than that; he denies a crucial component of justification, namely imputation.
In 1950 the average age at marriage was twenty for women and twenty-two for men; by 2019 those numbers rose to twenty-eight for women and thirty for men.Remarriage in Early Christianity, Eerdmans, 7
The cross is the object of faith, the theme of worship, the means of bringing men to God, the basis of living the saved life, the burden of apostolic preaching, and the reality signified by the sacraments.
If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.
For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. 'Father' is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.Knowing God (??)
Today, however, Christians in the West are found to be on the whole passionless, passive and one fears, prayerless. Cultivating an ethos that encloses personal piety in a pietistic cocoon, they leave public affairs to go their own way and neither expect nor, for the most part, seek influence beyond their own Christian circle... [but] the Puritans labored for a holy England and New England -sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns, national judgement threatens.
New Testament references to the blood of Christ are regularly sacrificial (e.g., Rom 3:25; 5:9; Eph 1:7; Rev 1:5). As a perfect sacrifice for sin (Rom 8:3; Eph 5:2; 1Pet 1:18–19), Christ's death was our redemption (i.e., our rescue by ransom: the paying of a price that freed us from the jeopardy of guilt, enslavement to sin, and expectation of wrath; Rom 3:24; Gal 4:4–5; Col 1:14)Concise Theology, Tyndale House, 135
Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take
primary responsibility for Christlike servant-leadership, protection, and provision in the home.
Submission is the divine calling of a wife to honor
and affirm her husband's leadership, and help carry it
through according to her gifts.
In the New Testament, grace means God's love in action toward people who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves. Grace means God sending his only Son to the cross to descend into hell so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven.
There is tremendous relief in knowing his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion him about me.