A little in the world will content a Christian for his passage, but all the world, and ten thousand times more, will not content a Christian for his portion. A carnal heart will be content with these things of the world for his portion; and that is the difference between a carnal heart and a gracious heart.Maintain your liberty in Christ by refusing to look any more to the law for justification, and by refusing to fear its words of condemnation. You are to live, in respect of your practice and obedience, as men who can neither be condemned by the law nor justified by it. It is a hard lesson to live above the law, and yet to walk according to the law. But this is the lesson a Christian has to learn, to walk in the law in respect of duty, but to live above it in respect of comfort, neither expecting favour from the law in respect of his obedience nor fearing harsh treatment from the law in respect of his failings. Let the law come in to remind you of sin if you fall into sin, but you are not to suffer it to arrest you and drag you into the court to be tried and judged for your sins. This would be to make void Christ and grace. Indeed Christians too much live as though they were to expect life by works, and not by grace. We are too big in ourselves when we do well, and too little in Christ in our failings. O that we could learn to be nothing in ourselves in our strength, and to be all in Christ in our weakness! In a word, let us learn to walk in the law as a rule of sanctification, and yet to live upon Christ and the promises in respect of justification.
- pp219–220, Samuel Bolton (1606–1654) in The True Bounds of Christian Freedom (first published 1645, Puritan Paperback edition by Banner of Truth, 1964)
The observable and practical love among true Christians that the world has a right to be able to observe in our day certainly should cut without reservation across such lines as languages, nationalities, national frontiers, younger and older, colors of skin, levels of education and economics, accent, line of birth, the class system in any particular locality, dress, short or long hair among whites and African and non-African hairdos among blacks, the wearing of shoes and the non-wearing of shoes, cultural differentiations and the more traditional and less traditional forms of worship.
-- p30, The Mark of the Christian by Francis Schaeffer (2nd edition, IVP, 2006)
Take heed to yourselves, because there are many eyes upon you, and there will be many to observe your falls. [[…]] As you take yourselves for the lights of the churches, you may expect that men’s eyes will be upon you. If other men may sin without observation, so cannot you. And you should thankfully consider how great a mercy this is, that you have so many eyes to watch over you, and so many ready to tell you of your faults; and thus have greater helps than others, at least for restraining you from sin. Though they may do it with a malicious mind, yet you have the advantage of it. God forbid that we should prove so impudent as to do evil in the public view of all, and to sin wilfully while the world is gazing on us! [[…]] Take heed therefore to yourselves, and do your work as those that remember that the world looks on them, and that with the quick-sighted eye of malice, ready to make the worst of all, to find the smallest fault where it is, to aggravate it where they find it, to divulge it and to take advantage of it to their own designs, and to make faults where they cannot find them. How cautiously, then, should we walk before so many ill-minded observers!
— Richard Baxter, TheReformed Pastor, p75–76 (emphasis mine)
Think of some of the greatest biblical figures who ever lived: Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, King David, Elijah, Elisha, Jonah, Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel, Mary, John the Baptist, Peter, and Paul. Or what about the great figures of church history: Augustine, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Spurgeon? Or consider the great political and military heroes of world history: Alexander the Great, Constantine the Great, Napoleon, and Winston Churchill. Who are these people, even the greatest saints, compared with Jesus Christ? They are like grain of sand compared with Mount Everest.
What is Samson's strength compared with that of Jesus, who was raised in power? What is Solomon's wisdom compared with that of the one in whom all the treasures of wisdom are contained? What is Methuselah's age compared with the age of the one who inhabits the places of eternity? What are Paul's visions of heaven compared with the sight of the Lord of heaven? What are Elisha's miracles compared with the incarnation and resurrection of the God-man?
-- Mark Jones, Knowing Christ, xiii
Question: "Suppose you have the peace of God. Will not that quiet you?"
Answer: "No, I must have the God of peace; as the peace of God, so the God of peace; that is, I must enjoy that God that gives me the peace; I must have the Cause as well as the effect; I must see from whence my peace comes and enjoy the Fountain of my peace, as well as the streams of my peace."
-- Jeremiah Burroughs as quoted in Fred Sanders, The Triune God, p33–34
At one level the problem is indeed rejection of God's law. But underneath lies a failure to understand grace and ultimately to understand God. True, his love for me is not based on my qualification or my preparation. But it is misleading to say that God accepts us the way we are. Rather he accepts us despite the way we are. He receives us only in Christ and for Christ's sake. Nor does he mean to leave us the way he found us, but to transform us into the likeness of his Son. Without that transformation and new conformity of life we do not have any evidence that we were ever his in the first place.
At root then antinomianism separates God's law from God's person, and grace from the union with Christ in which the law is written in the heart. In doing so it jeopardizes not simply the Decalogue; it dismantles the truth of the gospel.
-- Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ, p154 (italics original)
'One of my own saddest recollections in pastoral ministry is of being told that during a new members' welcome that included a young husband with "a past," two "pillars of the church," esteemed for the model way in which they fulfilled all church membership responsibilities, were overheard to say, "What's he doing joining the church?" How easy it is to fall into a spirit of conditional grace toward prodigals even when the right doctrinal notes are struck!' - Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ, p73fn35
"Don't kid yourself that you love the church, or even that you love Jesus, if you're not prepared to love the particular people he has put you in fellowship with." - p147, Covenant Made Simple by Jonty Rhodes
Here, then, is the sovereign power with which the pastors of the church, by whatever name they be called, ought to be endowed. That is that they may dare boldly to do all things by God’s Word; may compel all worldly power, glory, wisdom, and exaltation to yield to and obey his majesty; supported by his power, may command all from the highest even to the last; may build up Christ’s household and cast down Satan’s; may feed the sheep and drive away the wolves; my instruct and exhort the teachable; may accuse, rebuke, and subdue the rebellious and stubborn; may bind and loose; finally, if need be, may launch thunderbolts and lightnings; but do all things in God’s Word. – Calvin, Institutes IV.Viii.9.
"... believers have no greater help than public worship, for by it God raises his own folk upward step by step." - Calvin, Institutes IV.i.5
Ponder this heart-supporting truth: how many troubles soever are upon [church], yet her King is in her. What! Hath the Lord forsaken his churches? […] ‘The Lord is with us, fear them not.’ A historian tells us, that when Antigonus overheard his soldiers reckoning how many their enemies were, and so discouraging one another, he suddenly stepped in among them with this question, ‘And how many do you reckon me for?’ Discouraged souls, how many do you reckon the Lord for? Is he not an overmatch for all his enemies? Is not one Almighty more than many mighties? ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ - p61, Keeping the Heart (italics original)
'It is the hardest work. Heart-work is hard work indeed. To shuffle over religious duties with a loose and heedless spirit, will cost no great pains; but to set thyself before the Lord, and tie up thy loose and vain thoughts to a constant and serious attendance upon him; this will cost thee something. To attain a facility and dexterity of language in prayer, and put thy meaning into apt and decent expressions, is easy; but to get thy heart broken for sin, while though art confessing it; melted with free grace while thou art blessing God for it; to be really ashamed and humbled through the apprehensions of God's infinite holiness, and to keep thy heart in this frame, not only in, but after duty, will surely cost thee some groans and pains of soul. To repress the outward acts of sin, and compose the external part of thy life in a laudable manner, is no great matter; even carnal persons, by the force of common principles, can do this: but to kill the root of corruption within, to set and keep up an holy government over thy thoughts, to have all things lie straight and orderly in the heart, this is not easy.' - John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p19–20
God did not sit down, deliberate carefully, and then decide that on balance he should hate evil. Nor is his freedom circumscribed by some law of retribution external to himself, like some human judge bound, even when he disapproves of them, by the laws passed by his national legislature. “Just” is what God is. “Angry with sin” is what he is. It is his whole nature, his very being, to recoil from it and condemn it. It is unimaginable that he should place idolatry, blasphemy, murder, rape, child abuse, greed, deceit, and exploitation outside the law, ignoring the pain they cause and the havoc they wreak. No human society places evil outside the law, and it is one of the paradoxes of this whole discourse that those who cry out most loudly for justice (against, e.g., child abusers and rapists) are often the very ones who deny the Almighty any judicial function. Yet our human systems of justice can have no legitimacy except as ordained by God, and while postmodernism may calmly discuss “Whose justice?,” our sanctions against crime clearly presuppose the validity of law and of appropriate retribution. We cannot deny to the Judge of all the earth the prerogatives we concede to our own petty judicatories. It is precisely because we are made in his image that we ourselves feel revulsion in the presence of evil. – p252, Donald Macleod, The Work of Christ Accomplished in The Christian Dogmatics (italics original)
