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.
If we want synonyms for "eat" and "drink," we find them in John 6 in such concepts as believe (vv. 29, 35, 47), come (v. 35), see (v.40), hear and learn of (v. 45). All indicate a response to Jesus. The terms eat and drink stress that this feeding by faith is to be as real as literal eating. http://www.tenth.org/resource-library/articles/the-lord-s-supper
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.
It is here, in the thing that happened after the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. 'The Word became flesh' (Jn. 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. ... The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets.Knowing God
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 (??)
In the ordinance believers commemorate the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ on their behalf. They celebrate the forgiveness of their sins through the blood of Christ (Matt 26:28), the establishment of God's new covenant with them, and their hope of one day eating this meal in the presence of God For the Glory of God (161)
The New Testament word for "repentance" means changing one's mind so that one's views, values, goals, and ways are changed and one's whole life is lived differently. The change is radical, both inwardly and outwardly; mind and judgment, will and affections, behavior and lifestyle, motives and purposes, are all involved. Repenting means starting to live a new life.Concise Theology Section 60
Man was not created autonomous, that is, free to be a law to himself, but theonomous, that is, bound to keep the law of his Maker.Concise Theology, Section 34
Jesus miraculous birth does in fact point to his deity and also to the reality of the creative power that operates in our new birth (John 1:13).Concise Theology, Section 41
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
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.