The loss of the traditional vision of God as holy is now manifested everywhere in the evangelical world. It is the key to understanding why sin and grace have become such empty terms. What depth or meaning, P.T. Forsyth asked, can these terms have except in relation to the holiness of God? Divorced from the holiness of God, sin is merely self-defeating behavior or a breach in etiquette. Divorced from the holiness of God, grace is merely empty rhetoric, pious window dressing for the modern technique by which sinners work out their own salvation. Divorced from the holiness of God, our gospel becomes indistinguishable from any of a host of alternative self-help doctrines. Divorced from the holiness of God, our public morality is reduced to little more than an accumulation of trade-offs between competing private interests. Divorced from the holiness of God, our worship becomes mere entertainment.

The holiness of God is the [foundation of reality]. Sin is defiance of God’s holiness, the Cross is the outworking and victory of God’s holiness, and faith is the recognition of God’s holiness. Knowing that God is holy is therefore the key to knowing life as it truly is, knowing Christ as he truly is, knowing why he came, and knowing how life will end.

– David Wells

AW Pink on when you are OBLIGATED to leave a church:

If any [pastor] usurps that office [established by Christ Himself], and under cloak thereof do teach or enjoin things contrary to what Christ has instituted, then no obedience unto them is required by this command. But it is just at this point that most difficulty is experienced today. For many years past large numbers of professing Christians have been demanding that the religious leaders should speak unto them “smooth things”, yea, prophesy unto them “deceits”, declining to listen unto what condemned their carnal and worldly lives and refusing to heed the holy requirements of God. In consequence, He has suffered their descendants to reap the evil sowings of their fathers, by largely withholding “pastors after His own heart”, and allowing thousands of unregenerate men to occupy the modern pulpit. Instead of “obeying” and “submitting” to them, God requires His people to turn away from and have nothing to do with them. –AW Pink, Exposition of Hebrews

From Robert Reymond’s – New Systematic Theology Of The Christian Faith:

Separation from one’s local church or denomination is appropriate if it will not discipline heretics (2 Cor. 6:14-18). If a church rejects discipline for theological errors that subvert the foundation of the gospel and becomes theologically pluralistic in practice (even though it may retain an orthodox confession by which it promises to be guided), that church has become “heretical” in that it no longer stands under the authority of God, and the orthodox are compelled to separate from it to bear witness to the marks of the church.

For myself, as I am ashamed of my dull and careless heart, and of my slow and unprofitable course of life, so, the Lord knows, I am ashamed of every sermon I preach; when I think what I have been speaking of, and who sent me, and that men’s salvation or damnation is so much concerned in it, I am ready to tremble lest God should judge me as a slighter of His truths and the souls of men, and lest in the best sermon I should be guilty of their blood.

Me thinks we should not speak a word to men in matters of such consequence without tears, or the greatest earnestness that possibly we can; were not we too much guilty of the sin which we reprove, it would be so.

– Richard Baxter

1615 – 1691

HT: Pulpit Magazine

What does it mean to be a Christian?  What I consider to be the greatest weakness of contemporary evangelical Christianity in America . . . did I say weakness?  It is more.  It is a tragic error.  It is the idea – where did it ever come from? – that one can be a Christian without being a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.  It reduces the gospel to the mere fact of Christ’s having died for sinners, requires of sinners only that they acknowledge this by the barest intellectual assent, and then assures them of their eternal security when they may very well not be born again.  This view bends faith beyond recognition – at least for those who know what the Bible says about faith – and promises a false peace to thousands who have given verbal assent to this reductionist Christianity but are not truly in God’s family.

– James Montgomery Boice

We are one body…one body. Not at the expense of truth and not at the expense of iniquity, we do not unite around confusion, we unite around the truth. It is a unity built on truth. It is the unity of the faith…the unity of the faith, as well as the unity of the Spirit. It is that unity which belongs to us because we possess the same life of God…the same living Christ…the same Spirit of Christ, as Paul identifies Him in Romans 8. It is the unity of a common understanding of Scripture and the Word of God.

There is a drive today in evangelicalism…and what a bland term that has become. But there is a drive in evangelicalism for an ecumenism that ignores sound doctrine, that overlooks error and accepts even what we would deem as heresy. There is a kind of evangelical ecumenism that says we’re all one and we need to enjoy one another without regard for any of our doctrinal differences. That is a false and unbiblical and displeasing unity, if indeed it is unity at all in the sense that it dishonors and displeases the Lord.

There is another kind of striving for unity that wants to disregard iniquity and embrace everybody no matter whether they are walking in obedience to the Word of God or not, overlooking their sin and their iniquity.

But quite the contrary. The Scripture says if there is someone in your midst, according to Titus chapter 3, teaching error, if there is a heretic there, admonish him once, admonish him twice and then put him out. He’s forfeited a right to lay any claim to acceptance within that unity. And if there is a brother or sister in iniquity, you go to him or her and you go through a process calling them to repentance. And if they do not repent, you put them out. And the Apostle Paul reminds the Thessalonians of what that’s like. He says this in 2 Thessalonians 3:6, “We command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you stay apart, or keep aloof, from every brother who leads an unruly life, not according to the tradition which you’ve received from us.” That tradition not being some rabbinic tradition, but that tradition established by the revelation from God.

If you have someone in your church who is teaching error, you cannot have unity with that individual. If you have someone who is leading an unruly or sinful life, you cannot have fellowship with that individual. So what we’re talking about here is the pursuit of the true unity of the Spirit that belongs to those who surround the truth and affirm it and who live godly lives.

– John MacArthur

From his sermon entitled “Fundamental Christian Attitudes: Unity”

We have heard dying men singing themselves into the bottomless pit with this lullaby, “Yes, sir, I am a sinner, but God is merciful; God is good.” Ah! dear friends, let such remember that God is just as well as good, and that he will by no means spare the guilty, except through the great atonement of his Son Jesus Christ. The doctrine of election, in a most blessedly honest manner does come in, and breaks the neck, once for all, of all this false and groundless confidence in the uncovenanted mercy of God. Sinner, you have no right to trust to the goodness of God out of Christ. There is no word in the whole Book of Inspiration, which gives the shadow of a hope to the man who will not believe in Jesus Christ. It says of him, “He that believeth not shall be damned.” It declares of you, who are resting upon such a poor confidence as the unpromised favor of heaven, “Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, Jesus Christ the righteous.”

From a sermon entitled “Election No Discouragement To Seeking Souls,” delivered February 7, 1864.

– Charles Spurgeon

1834 – 1892

“The offence of prayer is that it does not essentially tie in to mental efficiency. Prayer is conditioned by one thing–spirituality. You do not need to be spiritual to preach or deliver sermons of homiletical perfection of exegetical exactitude. Preaching affects men, but prayer affects God. Preaching often affects time, but prayer affects eternity. The pulpit can be a shop window to display our talent, but the prayer closet speaks death to fleshly display.

The tragedy of this hour is that we have too many dead men giving out dead sermons to dead people. Why? Because the strange thing today which exists in the pulpit is a horrible thing: it is preaching without unction. What is unction? It’s hard to define. Preaching without unction kills instead of giving life. The unctionless preacher is a savor of death unto death. The Word does not live unless divine unction is upon the preacher. Preachers, with all thy getting–get unction from above!

Preaching is a spiritual business. A sermon born in the head reaches the head, but a sermon born in the heart reaches the heart. Unction cannot be learned, but only experienced through prayer. Unction is like dynamite–it will pierce, it will sweeten, it will soften. When the hammer of logic and the fire of human zeal fail to open the stony heart, unction will succeed.

Away with this powerless preaching which is unmoving because it was born in a tomb instead of a womb, and nourished in a fireless, prayerless soul. If God has called us preachers to the ministry, then we should get unctionized. With all thy getting–get unction, lest barrenness will be the badge of our unctionless intellectualism.“

– Leonard Ravenhill

1907 – 1994

HT: Thoughts on the Way

“Death (of a Church) occurs when unbelievers are allowed to take over ministries in the church. It happens when a church becomes more concerned with form and liturgy than it is with life on a spiritual level. Death occurs when a church becomes more concerned about welfare and social ills than it is about salvation. It happens when a church loves systems more than it loves Jesus Christ. And it happens when a church becomes more concerned with material things than spiritual reality. That’s how a church dies. It all is a result of sin.

Sin–in any form that the church tolerates, whether it is in the members or the leaders. Tolerance of sin begins the cycle; then comes the tolerance of unbelievers in the church until no one cares who is a believer or an unbeliever. The end comes when the man who runs the church isn’t a believer. Sins of commission and omission kill a church little by little. When that happens, Christians become carnal. Soon afterwards, unbelievers come into the church, and then a total tolerance for sin exists. The church begins to die, and the people who really love Jesus Christ leave only to be replaced by people who don’t know Him.” —John MacArthur

HAT TIP: The Bororean

“By its very definition grace, as it is worked out in our salvation, is in direct opposition to all works and worthiness. We discover from this that those who seek to join grace and works together are terribly deceived. They may make high claims concerning their own holiness of life. However, it is clear from the Word of God and from the very nature of grace that they are on a road that will certainly lead to the everlasting ruin of their souls. Perhaps grace will prevent this, that very grace of which they have such false and corrupt ideas. Divine grace disdains the assistance of men and women’s poor and imperfect efforts in the work of salvation. This is the exclusive right of grace alone. Any attempt to complete what grace begins betrays our pride, offends the Lord and cannot be for our spiritual advantage. Never forget that grace is either absolutely free or it is not grace at all. Never forget that anyone who professes to be saved by grace must believe in his heart that he is saved entirely by that grace. If he does not, then he is being inconsistent in matters of the greatest importance.”

—Abraham Booth

1734 – 1806

Excerpt taken from the The Reign of Grace, by Abraham Booth

HAT TIP: The Bororean

“But Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.” – Exodus 7:12

This incident is an instructive emblem of the sure victory of the divine handiwork over all opposition. Whenever a divine principle is cast into the heart, though the devil may fashion a counterfeit, and produce swarms of opponents, as sure as ever God is in the work, it will swallow up all its foes. If God’s grace takes possession of a man, the world’s magicians may throw down all their rods; and every rod may be as cunning and poisonous as a serpent, but Aaron’s rod will swallow up their rods. The sweet attractions of the cross will woo and win the man’s heart, and he who lived only for this deceitful earth will have an eye for the upper spheres, and a wing to mount into celestial heights. When grace has won the day the worldling seeks the world to come. The same fact is to be observed in the life of the believer. What multitudes of foes has our faith had to meet! Our old sins – the devil threw them down before us, and they turned to serpents. What hosts of them! Ah, but the cross of Jesus destoys them all. Faith in Christ makes short work of all our sins. Then the devil has launched forth another host of serpents in the form of worldly trials, temptations, unbelief; but faith in Jesus is more than a match for them, and overcomes them all. The same absorbing principle shines in the faithful service of God! With an enthusiastic love for Jesus difficulties are surmounted, sacrifices become pleasures, sufferings are honors. But if religion is thus a consuming passion in the heart, then it follows that there are many persons who profess religion but have it not; for what they have will not bear this test. Examine yourself, my reader, on this point. Aaron’s rod proved its heavengiven power. Is your religion doing so? If Christ be anything He must be everything. O rest not till love and faith in Jesus be the master passions of your soul!

This devotion was taken from “Morning and Evening” by C.H. Spurgeon

– Charles Spurgeon

1834 – 1892

“Exposing error is most unpopular work. But from every true standpoint it is worthwhile work. To our Savior, it means that He receives from us, His blood-bought ones, the loyalty that is His due. To ourselves, if we consider “the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt,” it ensures future reward, a thousand-fold. And to souls “caught in the snare of the fowler”-how many of them God only knows-it may mean light and life, abundant and everlasting.”

– Dr. Harry A. Ironside

See also: Dr. Harry Ironside: The Value of Exposing Error

HAT TIP: Slice of Laodicea

“He humbled Himself” – Philippians 2:8

Jesus is the great teacher of lowliness of heart. We need daily to learn of Him. See the Master taking a towel and washing His disciples’ feet! Follower of Christ, wilt thou not humble thyself? See Him as the Servant of servants, and surely thou canst not be proud! Is not this sentence the compendium of His biography, “He humbled Himself”? Was He not on earth always stripping off first one robe of honor and then another, till, naked, He was fastened to the cross, and there did He not empty out His inmost self, pouring out His life-blood, giving up for all of us, till they laid Him penniless in a borrowed grave? How low was our dear Redeemer brought! How then can we be proud? Stand at the foot of the cross, and count the purple drops by which you have been cleansed; see the thorn-crown; mark His scourged shoulders, still gushing with encrimsoned rills; see hands and feet given up to the rough iron, and His whole self to mockery and scorn; hear the thrilling shriek, “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken Me?” And if you do not lie prostrate on the ground before that cross, you have never seen it: if you are not humbled in the presence of Jesus, you do not know Him. You were so lost that nothing could save you but the sacrifice of God’s only begotten. Think of that, and as Jesus stooped for you, bow yourself in lowliness at His feet. A sense of Christ’s amazing love to us has a greater tendency to humble us than even a consciousness of our own guilt. May the Lord bring us in contemplation to Calvary, then our position will no longer be that of the pompous man of pride, but we shall take the humble place of one who loves much because much has been forgiven him. Pride cannot live beneath the cross. Let us sit there and learn our lesson, and then rise and carry it into practice.

This devotional was taken from “Morning and Evening”by C.H. Spurgeon.

The gospel message in all its component facts is a clear, definitive, confident, authoritative proclamation that Jesus is Lord, and that He gives eternal and abundant life to all who believe. We who truly know Christ and have received that gift of eternal life have also received from Him a clear, definitive commission to deliver the gospel message boldly as His ambassadors. If we are likewise not clear and distinct in our proclamation of the message, we are not being good ambassadors.

But we are not merely ambassadors. We are simultaneously soldiers, commissioned to wage war for the defense and dissemination of the truth in the face of countless onslaughts against it. We are AMBASSADORS – with a message of good news for people who walk in a land of darkness and dwell in the land of the shadow of death (Isaiah 9:2). And we are SOLDIERS – charged with pulling down ideological strongholds and casting down the lies and deception spawned by the forces of evil (2 Corinthians 10:3-5; 2 Timothy 2:3-4).

Notice carefully: our task as ambassadors is to bring good news to people. Our mission as soldiers is to OVERTHROW FALSE IDEAS. We must keep those objectives straight; we are not entitled to wage physical warfare against people or enter into diplomatic relations with anti-Christian ideas. Our warfare is not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12); and our duty as ambassadors does not permit us to compromise or align ourselves with any kind of human philosophies, religious deceit, or any other kind of falsehood (Colossians 2:8).

If those sound like difficult assignments to keep in balance and maintain in proper perspective, it is because they are indeed. Jude certainly understood this. The Holy Spirit inspired him to write his short epistle to people who were struggling with some of these very same issues. He nevertheless urged them to contend earnestly for the faith against all falsehood, while doing everything possible to deliver souls from destruction: “pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh” (Jude 23).

So we are ambassador-soldiers, reaching out to sinners with the truth even as we make every effort to destroy the lies and other forms of evil that hold them in deadly bondage. That is a perfect summary of every Christian’s duty in The Truth War

– John MacArthur from his book The Truth War (pages 25-26):

“The king also himself passed over the brook of Kidron.” – 2 Samuel 15:23

David passed that gloomy brook when flying with his mourning company from his traitor son. The man after God’s own heart was not exempt from trouble, nay, his life was full of it. He was both the Lord’s Anointed, and the Lord’s Afflicted. Why then should we expect to escape? At sorrow’s gates the noblest of our race have waited with ashes on their heads, wherefore then should we complain as though some strange thing had happened to us?

The KING of kings himself was not favored with a more cheerful or royal road. He passed over the filthy ditch of Kidron, through which the filth of Jerusalem flowed. God had one Son without sin, but not a single child without the rod. It is a great joy to believe that Jesus has been tempted in all points as we are. What is our Kidron this morning? Is it a faithless friend, a sad bereavement, a slanderous reproach, a dark foreboding? The King has passed over all these. Is it bodily pain, poverty, persecution, or contempt? Over each of these Kidrons the King has gone before us. “In all our afflictions He was afflicted.” The idea of strangeness in our trials must be banished at once and forever, for He who is the Head of all saints, knows by experience the grief which we think so peculiar. All the citizens of Zion must be free of the Honorable Company of Mourners, of which the Prince Immanuel is Head and Captain.

Notwithstanding the abasement of David, he yet returned in triumph to his city, and David’s Lord arose victorious from the grave; let us then be of good courage, for we also shall win the day. We shall yet with joy draw water out of the wells of salvation, though now for a season we have to pass by the noxious streams of sin and sorrow. Courage, soldiers of the Cross, the King himself triumphed after going over Kidron, and so shall you.

This devotional was taken from “Morning and Evening”by C.H. Spurgeon.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus. (Acts 4:13)

The contemporary moral climate does not favor a faith as tough and fibrous as that taught by our Lord and His apostles. The delicate, brittle saints being produced in our religious hothouses today are hardly to be compared with the committed, expendable believers who once gave their witness among men. And the fault lies with our leaders. They are too timid to tell the people all the truth. They are now asking men to give to God that which costs them nothing.

Our churches these days are filled (or one-quarter filled) with a soft breed of Christian that must be fed on a diet of harmless fun to keep them interested. About theology they know little. Scarcely any of them have read even one of the great Christian classics, but most of them are familiar with religious fiction and spinetingling films. No wonder their moral and spiritual constitution is so frail. Such can only be called weak adherents of a faith they never really understood. TIC, 76.

“Lord, send the Holy Spirit to renew within us a depth and seriousness in our pulpits. Give us boldness in our preaching. Amen.”

A.W. Tozer, Tozer on Christian Leadership, May 20

HAT TIP: Christian Research Net

Sound, biblical doctrine is a necessary aspect of true wisdom and authentic faith. The attitude that scorns doctrine while elevating feelings or blind trust cannot legitimately be called faith at all, even if it masquerades as Christianity. It is actually an irrational form of unbelief.

—John MacArthur

Lower the Law and you dim the light by which man perceives his guilt; this is a very serious loss to the sinner rather than a gain; for it lessens the likelihood of his conviction and conversion. I say you have deprived the Gospel of its ablest auxiliary [its most powerful weapon] when you have set aside the Law. You have taken away from it the schoolmaster that is to bring men to Christ … They will never accept grace till they tremble before a just and holy Law. Therefore the Law serves a most necessary purpose, and it must not be removed from its place.

– Charles Spurgeon

1834 – 1892

Acquaint now thyself with Him – Job 22:21

If we would rightly “acquaint ourselves with God and be at peace”, we must know Him as He has revealed Himself, not only in the unity of His essence, but also in the plurality of His persons. God said, “Let us make man in our own image” – let not man be content until he knows something of the “us” from whom his being was derived. Endeavor to know the Father; bury your head in His bosom in deep repentance, and confess that you are not worthy to be called His son; receive the kiss of His love; let the ring which is the token of His eternal faithfulness be on your finger; sit at His table and let your heart make merry in His grace. Then press forward and seek to know much of the Son of God who is the brightness of His Father’s glory, and yet in unspeakable condescension of grace became a man for our sakes; know Him in the singular complexity of His nature: eternal God, and yet suffering, finite man; follow Him as He walks the waters with the tread of deity, and as He sits upon the well in the weariness of humanity. Be not satisfied unless you know much of Jesus Christ as your Friend, your Brother, your Husband, your all. Forget not the Holy Spirit; endeavor to obtain a clear view of His nature and character, His attributes, and His works. Behold that Spirit of the Lord, who first of all moved upon chaos, and brought forth order; who now visits the chaos of your soul, and creates the order of holiness. Behold Him as the Lord and giver of spiritual life, the Illuminator, the Instructor, the Comforter, and the Sanctifier. Behold Him as, like holy unction, He descends upon the head of Jesus, and then afterward rests upon you who are as the skirts of His garments. Such an intelligent, scriptural, and experimental belief in the Trinity in Unity is yours if you truly know God; and such knowledge brings peace indeed.

– Charles Spurgeon

1834 – 1892

This devotion was taken from Morning and Evening by C.H. Spurgeon.

God is the decider and determiner of every man’s destiny, the controller of every detail in every individual’s life, which is another way of saying, “He is God.”

– John MacArthur