Mark Dever:
“I wonder if God’s holiness, his awesomeness, is reflected in our public gatherings. So is God presented in our services, in our lives, as one who is unique, and holy, and set apart, and distinct. You know. I think in our generation, we treat casualness as if it’s the height of intimacy. But in the Bible, what happens again and again when people really run into the real God? They are undone; they confess their sins; they fall on their face. Ezekiel, with all of his religious knowledge and training as a priest, is silent.”
“Many of you are very careful about what the gospel is, and you should be. We hope to help you in that in this very conference. Should you also be very careful for the church who Christ gave this gospel to? Recapturing seminaries and even whole denominations for gospel work is good, but its fruit will not be with us for long if we don’t get on with the much larger task of cleaning up thousands upon thousands of local congregations who are poor witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“Realize that if we denounce sin from the pulpit, if we clearly, courageously, stand for the fact that abortion is a murder, the taking of a human life, and we do nothing about the members in our church who are doctors who are performing those abortions, then what are we saying with all our courageous-sounding words, if we’re not willing to do that difficult work down in the trenches of calling the guy up, getting involved in his life, speaking to him clearly about the decision he has to make, either to abandon his claim to follow Christ, or to abandon his sin? Friends, that’s what gives all our high-sounding words reality, and without them, those words can even be dangerous drugs to fool us into thinking we’re doing what we’re not really doing at all.”
John MacArthur:
“. . . I sleep very well. Just generally, wherever I am in the world, it seems I sleep. I think that my ability to sleep is, to some degree, related to my theology. That’s kind of where that title [A Theology of Sleep] comes from. If I believed that the salvation of souls depended on me, I don’t know that I could sleep well. I understand the horrors of eternal hell; I understand the wrath of God; I understand eternal judgment; I understand what’s at stake. It’s a passion for me to reach people with the gospel, and I suppose with that kind of conviction dominating my heart, under some circumstances and under the framework of some kinds of theology, I might have a hard time sleeping because of the urgencies of the issues at hand. But my confidence is in the Lord and in his power, and not in me. So I can enjoy rest, refreshment physically, occasionally diversion from the task, because I don’t do the Lord’s work. My responsibilities are very limited.”
John Piper:
“No matter how righteous you are, or how moral you are, or how religious you are, and no matter whether God has worked that in you or you have worked that in you, don’t trust in it. Don’t trust in anything that is in you, I don’t care how good it is, and I don’t care if it’s the work of the Holy Spirit. Don’t trust in what God has worked in you. Don’t trust in it. Trust in Christ alone, and his life, and his work on the cross, his blood and righteousness. Trust that. Trust that for your acceptance with God, for your justification.”
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Posted in: Together for the Gospel 2010
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