O my soul, is it possible for thee to hear the excellency of Scripture thus opened to thee, and not to burn in love to it? Hast thou been all this while in such a host bath, and still cold and shivering?The Christian Man\'s Calling
the decline of church discipline is perhaps the most visible failure of the contemporary church. No longer concerned with maintaining purity of confession or lifestyle, the contemporary church sees itself as a voluntary association of autonomous members, with minimal moral accountability to God, much less to each other.
Years ago I heard the story of an old preacher who told a group of younger preachers to remember that they would die. "They are going to put you in a box," he said, "and put the box in the ground, and throw dirt on your face, and then go back to the church and eat potato salad." That says it perfectly. Life goes on. If we transfer the convictions successfully, all will be well. If not, our stewardship is in danger . . . or in vain.The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership That Matters (p. 200)
You can divide all leaders into those who merely hold an office or position and those who hold great convictions. Life is too short to give much attention to leaders who stand for little or nothing, leaders who are looking for the next program or riding the latest leadership fad, trying on idea after idea but driven by no deep convictions.The Conviction to Lead, 25
We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality, but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the moral authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot have on the terms that we want it.
We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.
As Theo Hobson describes it, for a full moral reversal to take place three conditions must be met. The first is this: what was condemned must be celebrated. The second is that what was celebrated must now be condemned. And thirdly, those who will not join in the celebration will be condemned.
In short, I will preach it [the Word], teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.
hire on the basis of conviction. This is essential, and yet this is where many leaders subvert their own leadership. We are all easily (and often rightly) impressed with expertise and ability, but these cannot compensate for a lack of conviction. When it comes to hiring leaders who will have a role in directing the work, conviction is nonnegotiable. You cannot possibly lead with conviction if you entrust the future of your organization to people who do not share those convictions. This is how great movements die - they begin with clarity and end with confusion, or worse.The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership That Matters (p. 203-204)
The collapse in evangelical doctrinal consensus is intimately related to the collapse in the understanding of, and role assigned to, Scripture as God's Word spoken within the church.Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Be thankful to God for the scriptures. What a mercy is it that God has not only acquainted us what his will is, but that he has made it known by writing!A Body of Divinity, p37
There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard.The Doctrine of the Word of God
either no human writings at all must be considered as true, or everyone must acknowledge that the sacred accounts are true and reliable -and hence, also divine.Synopsis of a Purer Theology, Disputation 2