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: Soli Deo Gloria
I cannot see how any man deserves to be called “holy,” who willfully allows himself in sins, and is not humbled and ashamed because of them.
Answering a student’s question, “Will the heathen who have not heard the Gospel be saved?” thus, it is more a question with me whether we, who have the Gospel and fail to give it to those who have not, can be saved.
It will not do to say that you have no special call to go to China. With these facts before you and with the command of the Lord Jesus to go and preach the gospel to every creature, you need rather to ascertain whether you have a special call to stay at home.
Few things are so distasteful to the proud human heart as the truth that God does as He pleases, without consulting with the creature; that He dispenses His favors entirely according to His imperial will. Fallen man has no claims upon Him, is destitute of any merit, and can do nothing whatever to win God’s esteem.
The problem is not that Christians have disappeared, but that Christian faith has become so deformed. Under the influence of modernity, we modern Christians are literally capable of winning the world while losing our own souls.
“‘Not called!” did you say? “Not heard the call,” I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father’s house and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look Christ in the face — whose mercy you have professed to obey — and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world.
If man is merely a glorified single-celled organism run amok, he has no inherent worth, value, or dignity; ultimately man is then merely a cosmic accident, and the human community bestows any value he has upon him. It is not difficult to see how this would lead to a radical view on abortion. Peter Singer, a renowned bioethicist at Princeton University, argues that abortion should be legal prior to “personhood.” What makes this shocking is that Singer’s definition of personhood would carry the abortion question not into the second or third trimester of a pregnancy but into the second year after birth. That’s right, by Singer’s definition my thirteen-month-old son (due to the fact that he cannot communicate or sustain his own life without help) has not yet reached personhood, and to take his life now would be no more problematic than a pre-birth abortion. While this is shocking, I must ask a question: What is the difference between my thirteen-month-old son and a six-month-old fetus? The answer is, location. If it is acceptable to kill a child in the womb, it is also acceptable to do so outside the womb. Peter Singer is not being morbid, he is being consistent.
It was quite refreshing one night to find in the inquiry room a young man who thought he was not worth saving, he was so vile and wicked. There was hope for him because he was so desperately in earnest about his soul. He thought he was worthless. He had a sight of himself in God’s looking glass and had a very poor opinion of himself. One can always tell when a man is a great way from God–for he is always talking about himself, and how good he is. But the moment he sees God by the eye of faith, he is down on his knees, and, like Job, he cries, “Behold, I am vile.” All his goodness flees away.
When God changes the heart and spirit, the physical changes also. If you want to meet the needs of the poor in this world, there is no better place to start than by preaching the Gospel. It has done more to lift up the downtrodden, the hungry, and the needy than all the social programs ever imagined by secular humanists.
A man is either 100% righteous, or he is condemned. If a murderer is charged with seven counts of murder and only convicted of one, he’s still a condemned man! Reader, if you have even one sin that you have to pay for yourself, you will be in Hell forever.
I read this book a couple years ago and found it to be an incredible warning to the churches. It also was part of several things God used to draw me out of the lukewarm, mile-wide, inch-deep “churches” that I was attending.
Catholic bishops have condemned us as heretics and have cursed us over 100 times with anathemas pronounced by the Council of Trent and the 2nd Vatican Council. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Every heretic is to have part with the Devil and his angels in the flames of eternal fire, unless before the end of his life, he be restored to the Catholic Church.” What a paradox! Christians, who embrace God’s infallible truth, are eternally condemned by this apostate religion, and then called Catholic-bashers for trying to rescue Catholics who are enslaved by doctrines of demons (1 Tim. 4:1).
Men tell us that our preaching should be positive and not negative, that we can preach the truth without attacking error. But if we follow that advice we shall have to close our Bible and desert its teachings. The New Testament is a polemic book almost from beginning to end . . . . It is when men have felt compelled to take a stand against error that they have risen to the really great heights in the celebration of the truth.
Beware that you do not forget the LORD your God by not keeping His commandments and His ordinances and His statutes which I am commanding you today; otherwise, when you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built good houses and lived in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all that you have multiplies, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
Our holy Lord requires absolute submission and obedience in all things, both in the inward life and the outward, even to “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Alas that this is so little insisted upon in a day when the high claims of the Savior are whittled down in an attempt to render His Gospel more acceptable to the unregenerate.
Christ Alone Wyoming 