Right views concerning Christ are indispensable to a right faith, and a right faith is indispensable to salvation. To stumble at the foundation, is, concerning faith, to make shipwreck altogether; for as Immanuel, God with us, is the grand Object of faith, to err in views of His eternal Deity, or to err in views of His sacred humanity, is alike destructive. There are points of truth which are not fundamental, though erroneous views on any one point must lead to God-dishonoring consequences in strict proportion to its importance and magnitude; but there are certain foundation truths to err concerning which is to insure for the erroneous and the unbelieving, the blackness of darkness forever.
– J.C. Philpot
1802 – 1869
I’m not trying to say that it is necessarily wrong for children to play organized sports . . . . [but] being a member of an organized traveling baseball squad at age ten doesn’t add a single day to one’s life. In fact, many of these activities get in the way of much loftier pursuits. People turned boys into men and girls into women for most of recorded history without dragging them around town with their tongues hanging out in an effort to keep up with their overachieving, undereducated, theologically illiterate peers as they try to win trophies that will eventually gather dust in a basement somewhere. If I teach my son to keep his eye on the ball but fail to teach him to keep his eyes on Christ, I have failed as a father.
To complain against the partiality of grace is suicidal. If the sinner insists upon bare justice, then the lake of fire must be his eternal portion. His only hope lies in . . . casting himself on the mercy of God, and stretching forth empty hands to avail himself of the grace of God made known to him in the Gospel.
No matter how great your sins may be, they are nothing compared to the infinite worth of Christ’s blood!
While some are satisfied with a miserably low degree of attainment, and others are not ashamed to live on without any holiness at all—content with a mere round of churchgoing and chapel-going, but never getting on, like a horse in a mill—let us stand fast in the old paths, follow after eminent holiness ourselves, and recommend it boldly to others.
Too much time is spent developing methods and theories for Bible teaching, and insufficient time is given to simply teaching the Scriptures as they have been written.
Our children are not falling away [from the Christian faith] because the church is doing a poor job—although that is undoubtedly a factor. Our children are falling away because we are asking the church to do what God designed the family to accomplish. Discipleship and multi-generational faithfulness begins and ends at home. At best, the church is to play a supporting role as it “equips the saints for the work of ministry” (Ephesians 4:12 ESV).
Any student of the Old Testament knows that God was concerned about Israel’s susceptibility to influence from the people of Canaan. He commanded Israel to drive the nations out, to show no mercy. God knew that if the people of Canaan lived alongside Israel, they would go astray. Like Old Testament Israel, you too, are subject to the powerful influence of your culture. Like Israel, you must reject things in the culture that are abhorrent to Jehovah your God.
We live in strange times. We live in times where people can tell you about the ten hills, and the ten kings, and ten horns, and ten heads in Revelation, and yet don’t know diddly about justification.
In few countries is the failure of Christian humanism more apparent than in Thailand. There, after 150 years of missionaries showing marvelous social compassion, Christians still make up only two percent of the entire population. Self-sacrificing missionaries probably have done more to modernize the country than any other single force. Thailand owes to missionaries its widespread literacy, first printing press, first university, first hospital, first doctor, and almost every other benefit of education and science. In every area, including trade and diplomacy, Christian missionaries put the needs of the host nation first and helped usher in the 20th century. Meanwhile, millions have slipped into eternity without the Lord. They died more educated, better governed, and healthier—but they died without Christ and are bound for Hell.
The majority of Christian teaching emphasizes individual doctrines of the Bible rather than presenting the Bible as one complete, interdependent revelation of God. Heresies, misrepresentation, and overemphasis of certain Scriptures, and denominationalism can, in most cases, be traced to this lack of chronological and panoramic Bible teaching.
Let’s play “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” For $500,000: Which of these churches was a growing church in the book of Revelation; the church at Laodicea (Rev 3:14-22), which saw itself as rich and wealthy and in need of nothing or the church at Smyrna (Rev. 2:8-11), which was described as poor, in tribulation, and facing great persecution? Need a lifeline you say? Here you go: God said of the Laodicean church that he would spit them out of his mouth, but of the Smyrna church that they would receive the crown of life.
Because the preaching of the Gospel is so low, the church is basically—the majority of it—are carnal lost people. And because it is a democracy, they, by and large, govern the direction of the church. And because the pastor doesn’t want to lose the great number of people and because he has wrong ideas regarding evangelism and true conversion, he caters to the wicked in his church and his little group of true sheep that belong to Jesus Christ are sitting there in the midst of all the theater, in the midst of all the worldliness, in the midst of all the multi-media going, “We just want to worship Jesus and we just want someone to teach us the Bible,” and pastors are going to pay for that. . . .
It is my contention that once biblical infallibility is surrendered it leads to the most undesirable consequences. It will end in apostasy at last. It is my opinion that it is next to impossible to stop the process of theological deterioration once inerrancy is abandoned.
Christ Alone Wyoming 