The Task of God’s People

“The task of God’s people is to make known the good news of God’s renewed reign over the entirety of creation. Christ’s kingly authority extends over the entirety of creation. God’s mission is equally comprehensive: to embody the good news that Jesus again rules over marriage and family, business and politics, art and athletics, leisure and scholarship, sex and technology. Since the gospel is a gospel of the kingdom, that mission is as wide as creation.”

~ Michael W. Goheen & Albert M Wolters, Creation Regained 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2005), 130.

G. K. Chesterton ~ On Quarrels & Arguments

“My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end. . . . I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and never once quarrelled. Perhaps the principle objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument.”

~ G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography, quoted by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. in Engaging God’s World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 128.

Martin Luther on Contending for the Truth

Telling the truth only when it is safe or convenient is cowardice. Contending for the faith where the truth is being opposed proves our loyalty to and love for the truth. Consider these words from Martin Luther:

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

~ Quoted in Parker T. Williamson, Standing Firm: Reclaiming Christian Faith in Times of Controversy  (Springfield, Pa.: PLC Publications, 1996), 5.

A World Without God

“The modern secular world—the world which tries to remove God from his all-creating, all-sustaining, all-defining, all-governing place—has no choice but to make itself god and to create its own morality. In other words, when man abandons God and his self-revelation as the source of what is objectively true and right and beautiful, the next highest court of appeal is man himself.

If God is not the measure of what is true and right and beautiful, then I am and you are. And since we—the god called ‘you,’ and the god called ‘me’—may not agree, the result will be: Might makes right. And everything in education, and media, and politics in this God-evicting world becomes a battle for power. Not a quest for objective truth and right and beauty, since there isn’t any, but a power-struggle. Because the one who has the power, in a world without God, defines reality. Defines what is true. Defines what is right. Defines what is beautiful. And there is no court of appeal in heaven for the weak. Man is god. And the powerful man is god-Almighty—the maker of the truth, the inventor of what is right, and the definer of what is beautiful. And the bloodiest century in the history of the world—the twentieth century with its Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini and Milosevic and Pot and Amin and Mao and Sung and Hussein and the abortion industry—prove it with horrifying evidence.”

~ John Piper, “Abortion and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil“

The Paradox of Being Human

“We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel!”

~ Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2004), 76

Nothing is ‘Neutral’

“The opposition between light and dark, life and death, wisdom and folly, health and sickness, obedience and disobedience manifests itself everywhere. Nothing is ‘neutral’ in the sense that sin fails to affect it or that redemption fails to hold out the promise of deliverance.”

~ Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2005), 82.

C. S. Lewis ~ On the Dangers of Love

“Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — sake, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”     

~ C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York, NY: Harcourt, 1960), 123.

The Essence of Sin & the Essence of Salvation

“The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties whcih belong to man alone.”

~ John Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 1986), 160.

The Essence of the Fall & the Ancient Origins of Modern Secularism

“The essence of the fall of Eve and Adam—and all of us in Adam—is the supreme pleasure we have in being independent, and deciding for ourselves what is true and right and beautiful, rather than finding supreme pleasure in God as the fountain of all that is true and right and beautiful. The essence of the fall is preferring to be god rather than enjoy God.

So the modern secular world is very old. It puts on new clothes from century to century, and we call it by different names. Recently: modernism, existentialism, secular humanism, postmodernism. But there is a common root they all share: God is dethroned, and the next highest court of appeal for truth and right and beauty is man—little, finite, fallible, mortal man.”

~ John Piper, “Abortion and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil“

Neopagan Spirituality

Carl E. Braaten describes a form of neopaganism that sounds alarmingly like a lot of the therapeutic spirituality that has taken such a firm hold on much of modern evangelicalism. He writes:

Neopaganism is spiritual religion attuned to the ‘Zeitgeist.’ It has no use for the concrete historical elements of the biblical gospel. It has no need of the church and the external word (verbatum externum), turning instead to pure immediacy and inwardness in which each individual personally acquires knowledge of God out of the depths of his or her own experience. People of this type care solely for their own spiritual journeys through life, and while they believe in an emerging universal fellowship in the spirit of love, the reality of the church as an elect communion of saints and sacred things is alien to their thinking. They do not understand the doctrines of the gospel to be true statements about events that have happened once and for all, but see them as symbols of eternal truths reflecting ever-recurring processes of life in the presence of God. History itself is nothing but a resource of symbols to stimulate certain moods and feelings according to each person’s private fancy. Worship means getting together in small groups of kindred spirits to hear one another’s stories.

~ “The Gospel in a Neopagan Culture” in Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1995), 19-20.