Do you mortify; do you make it your daily work; be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you.Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers Chapter 2
That is why the unregenerate person cannot understand the urgency of the gospel message: until they see the depth of their sin and the holiness of God, they find no reason to seek remedy for their condition.
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)
When I turn to the map of the world I must say the same thing. It matters not what quarter I examine: I find men's hearts are everywhere the same, and everywhere wicked. Sin is the family disease of all the children of Adam.Old Paths, Ch 7
You can never part with sin soon enough; it is a cursed inmate, that will surely bring mischief upon the soul that harbours it. It will set its own dwelling on fire.Works 7:147
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.
At the heart of all sin is a lie. The lie says to all of us in our sin, "The act you are now doing, the desire or attitude you are now feeling is not very bad because there are much worse things, not very bad because everyone else experiences the same things, not very bad because you can't help it, not very bad because there is no God, or, if that won't work, God knows you are but frail and weak and he will tolerate and pity your sin." There are a thousand distortions of the truth which sin brings with it into the human heart, so that Jeremiah cries out, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?" (17:9).
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.
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 (??)