Every other source of strength outside of Jesus Christ is a bitter source that will bare poisoned fruit. You take the most self-righteous, the most disciplined, religious person on the face of the earth, and externally their works might appear to be pristine; [but] their fruit is biter gall, it is poison, it will lead to damnation and hell. God accepts nothing from our flesh but only that which is produced from the source of life that flows from His dear Son.
– Paul Washer
The modern canonization of compromise represents a detour down a dead-end alley. Both Scripture and church history reveal the danger of compromising biblical truth. Those whom God uses are invariably men and women who swim against the tide. They hold strong convictions with great courage and refuse to compromise in the face of incredible opposition.
– John MacArthur
How foolish we are! How we repeat the folly of our first parent every day when we seek to hide sin from conscience, and then think it is hidden from God.
– Charles Spurgeon
1834 – 1892
If you knew the horrors of the potential judgment that hangs over us–if we really believed in what is coming–how differently we would live. Why aren’t Christians living in obedience to God? Because of their unbelief. Why did Eve fall into sin? Because she did not truly believe in the judgment–that death really would come if she ate what God forbade. This is the same reason many continue in lives of sin and disobedience. – K. P. Yohannan The goal of human philosophy used to be truth without God. Today’s philosophies are open to the notion of God without truth–or to be more accurate, personal “spirituality” in which everyone is free to create his or her own god. Personal gods pose no threat to sinful self-will, because they suit each sinner’s personal preferences anyway, and they make no demands on anyone else. 
I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone. The chance that all the functions of the individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.
– George Gallup (Statistician)
Clearly, spiritual ignorance and biblical illiteracy are commonplace among professing Christians. That kind of spiritual shallowness is a direct result of shallow teaching. Solid preaching with deep substance and sound doctrine is essential for Christians to grow. But churches today often teach only the barest basics–and sometimes less than that. Churches are therefore filled with baby Christians–people who are spiritual infants. That is a fitting description, because the characteristic that is most descriptive of an infant is selfishness. Babies are completely self-centered. They scream if they don’t get what they want when they want it. All they are aware of are their own needs and desires. They never say thanks for anything. They can’t help others; they can’t give anything. They can only receive. And certainly there is nothing wrong with that when it occurs in the natural stage of infancy. But to see a child whose development is arrested so that he never gets beyond that stage of helpless selfishness is a tragedy. And that is exactly the spiritual state of multitudes in the church today. They are utterly preoccupied with self. They want their own problems solved and their own comfort elevated. Their spiritual development is arrested, and they remain in a perpetual state of selfish helplessness. It is evidence of a tragic abnormality. Arrested infancy means people do not discern. Just as a baby crawls along the floor, putting anything it finds in its mouth, spiritual babies don’t know what is good for them and what isn’t. Immaturity and lack of discernment go together; they are virtually the same thing.Believers are willing to accept the concept of heaven, but they look the other way when they come to passages in the Bible about hell. Very few seem to believe that those who die without Christ are going to a place where they will be tormented forever and ever in a bottomless pit where the fire is not quenched and they are separated from God and His love for all eternity without any chance of return.
– K. P. Yohannan
If truth cannot be fearlessly proclaimed in the church, what place is there for truth at all? How can we build a generation of discerning Christians if we are terror-struck at the thought that non-Christians might not like hearing the universal truth? And since when has it been legitimate for the church to woo the world? Didn’t the apostle John write, “Do not marvel, my brethren, if the world hates you” (1 John 3:13)? And did not Jesus say, “The world . . . hates Me because I testify of it that its works are evil” (John 7:7)? Biblical Christians have always understood that they must shun the world. . . . The apostle Paul frankly would have had no patience for such tactics. He never sought to win the world through intellectual acceptance, personal popularity, image, status, reputation, or things of that sort. He wrote, “We have been made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things” (1 Corinthians 4:13). Is the contemporary church right to attempt a “more sophisticated” approach? Dare we set ourselves apart from the godly men of the past, all of whom had to fight for the truth? 
Satan will try hard to fill your minds with arguments against the practices of Christianity. He will draw your attention to the numbers of persons who use them and are no better for the using. “See there,” he will whisper, “do you not observe that those who go to church are no better than those who stay away?” But do not let this move you. It is never fair to argue against a thing because it is improperly used. It does not follow that the practices of Christianity can do no good because many do them and get no good from them. . . . The value of the practices of Christianity, like other things, depends, in a great measure, on the manner and spirit in which we use them. The only infallible interpreter of what we see in nature or know innately in our own consciences is the explicit revelation of Scripture. Since Scripture is also the one place where we are given the way of salvation, entrance into the kingdom of God, and an infallible account of Christ, the Bible is the touchstone to which all truth claims should be brought and by which all other truth must finally be measured. I was preaching somewhere in a town of 5,000 people and this guy [who was a street preacher] . . . had earrings and everything and hair all moussed and all this stuff because man, he was working the street. . . . He’s the dude, he’s the man you know, Serpico for Jesus type thing . . . and he’s like you don’t understand, you’re in context, you know, you’re preaching . . . [And I said] look, I worked inner city Dallas, I lived with male prostitutes, alright? And I’ll tell you how I dressed: I wore a pair of blue jeans, tennis shoes, a shirt, and my hair was combed. ‘Cause I want to be honest with you, those guys down there selling their bodies and the other guy’s selling drugs, and the girls dying of AIDS, they could care less whether I looked like them or not. What they wanted was someone who loved them. So that whole idea of you gotta look like them to relevant–no, you gotta love them to be relevant.
– Paul Washer
Not knowing what you believe (especially on a matter as essential to Christianity as the gospel) is by definition a kind of unbelief. Refusing to acknowledge and defend the revealed truth of God is a particularly stubborn and pernicious kind of unbelief. Advocating ambiguity, exalting uncertainty, or otherwise deliberately clouding the truth is a sinful way of nurturing unbelief. Every true Christian should know and love the truth. 
What a tragedy in our day we often hear the gospel appeal made on this kind of basis: Come to Jesus! You don’t have to obey anyone. You don’t have to change anything; you don’t have to give up anything . . . just come to Him and believe in Him as savior.
I believe that we should enter into relationships with unbelievers unless and until we begin to see that they’re having an influence on us. . . . It would be far more safe for me to sit down at a table with a bunch of drunks, drug addicts, and the whole nine yards, and sit there and talk to them and have fellowship with them; I am less likely to sin than to go to a Cabella’s or Bass pro-shop with a bunch of guys who are Christians and love to hunt. Why? The lifestyle of drugs and alcohol and all that stuff has no attraction for me anymore. But there are certain things, that are even good things, that can steal away your heart. One gets the distinct impression that objective, propositional truth means so little to [Brian] McLaren that he would consider a broad-minded Hindu who always tries to speak positively and tolerantly about others’ beliefs a better “Christian” that the preacher who openly curses someone else for teaching a wrong view of the law and the gospel. That, of course, would make the apostle Paul a bad Christian (Galatians 1:8-9)–not to mention Jesus (Matthew 23). 
Forgiveness costs us nothing. All our costly obedience is the fruit, not the root, of being forgiven. That’s why we call it grace. But it cost Jesus His life. That is why we call it just. Oh, how precious is the news that God does not hold our sins against us! And how beautiful is Christ, whose blood made it right for God to do this.
– John Piper
Rationality (the right use of sanctified reason through sound logic) is never condemned in Scripture. Faith is not irrational. Authentic biblical truth demands that we employ logic and clear, sensible thinking. . . . Scripture frequently employs logical devices, such as antithesis, if-then arguments, syllogisms, and propositions. These are all standard logical forms, and Scripture is full of them. Surely this is the way we should understand the sufferings and death of Christ. They have to do with me. They are about Christ’s love for me personally. It is my sin that cuts me off from God, not sin in general. It is my hard-heartedness and spiritual numbness that demean the worth of Christ. I am lost and perishing. When it comes to salvation, I have forfeited all claim on justice. All I can do is plead for mercy. The idea that the Christian message should be kept pliable and ambiguous seems especially attractive to young people who are in tune with the culture and in love with the spirit of the age and can’t stand to have authoritative biblical truth applied with precision as a corrective to worldly lifestyles, unholy minds, and ungodly behavior. And the poison of this perspective is being increasingly injected into the evangelical church body.
– John MacArthur
Christ Alone Wyoming 