Fred Sanders > Quotes

“A gospel which is only about the moment of conversion but does not extend to every moment of life in Christ is too small. A gospel that gets your sins forgiven but offers no power for transformation is too small. A gospel that isolates one of the benefits of union with Christ and ignores all the others is too small. A gospel that must be measured by your own moral conduct, social conscience, or religious experience is too small. A gospel that rearranges the components of your life but does not put you personally in the presence of God is too small.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“the church has always confessed the doctrine of the Trinity as something to be believed on the grounds of revelation alone as recorded in Scripture alone. The church should continue to do so.”
― Fred Sanders, The Triune God

“There are Christians whose three cardinal doctrines are (1) once saved always saved; (2) perfection on earth is impossible; (3) my future sins are already forgiven. These are less of a doctrinal system and more of a plan for excusing carnality. This kind of Christianity is matched by its evil opposite, which holds three truths to be scripturally evident above all else: (1) faith without works is dead; (2) nobody goes to heaven without true holiness; (3) we have free will. These are less of a doctrinal system and more of a declaration of intent to pursue righteousness by works. Any of these propositions might underwrite a healthy life of faith if placed in their proper contexts. But taken by themselves, or combined with other emphases that reinforce their dangers without balancing them out, they are disastrous.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“The gospel is so deep that it not only meets our deepest needs but comes from God’s deepest self. The”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“it is impossible to separate works from faith, as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Our great need is to be led further in to what we already have.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“God the Father sent the Son to do something for us and the Spirit to be something in us, to bring us into the family life of God. God,”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ,the man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him,helping him to pray,praying for him.You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach.God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kind of life—what I called Zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“Many evangelicals seem haunted by a sense of not being about anything except the moment of conversion. When they stop to ask themselves where they are taking their converts, they fear that when they get there, there will be no there there. When”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“watch Jesus and think Trinity can”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“A gospel that is only about the moment of conversion but does not extend to every moment of life in Christ is too small. A gospel that gets your sins forgiven but offers no power for transformation is too small. A gospel that isolates one of the benefits of union with Christ and ignores all the others is too small. A gospel that must be measured by your own moral conduct, social conscience, or religious experience is too small. A gospel that rearranges the components of your life but does not put you personally in the presence of God is too small.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“rule of Wesley”: Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“If we cannot trust the Church to have understood Jesus, then we have lost Jesus: and the resources of modern scholarship will not help us to find him.47”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“According to Wilberforce, slavery was permitted in England and America because this real Christianity had cooled; and real Christianity had cooled because essential Christian doctrines had been abandoned. If the nominal Christians of Britain were ignoring gross institutional wickedness like race-based chattel slavery, it was because their hearts were cold; and their hearts were cold because their heads were empty. What Dr. Wilberforce prescribes is a big dose of “the peculiar doctrines of Christianity”: not morality or piety in general, but the core doctrines that we know only from special divine revelation in Scripture. Wilberforce’s”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“The righteousness of Christ is necessary to entitle us to heaven, personal holiness to qualify us for it. Without the former we could have no claim to glory; without the latter we could have not fitness for it.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“But the grand radical defect in the practical system of these nominal Christians, is their forgetfulness of all the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess—the corruption of human nature—the atonement of the Saviour—and the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit.” Following”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Law and gospel are not identical, because command is not promise. But they are unified because the God who commands is the God who, in the very same words, promises.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Chart 7.1: The Work of the Son and the Spirit The Work of the Son The Work of the Spirit God with us, as one of us God with us, dwelling among us Incarnation Indwelling Hypostatic union Communion Assumes a human nature Enlivens human persons Substitutes for you Regenerates you Takes your place Puts you in your place Completes work all at once Continues work constantly Becomes a pattern for imitation Forms us to fit that pattern Is the one mediator Unites us to the mediator Accomplishes redemption Applies redemption”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“Wesley insisted on preaching the law to Christians because the law is God’s means of crafting a holy people. But Wesley knew the perils of the law as well as any Lutheran ever did. He was well aware that the preaching of the law brings with it certain dangers: legalism, condemnation, and pharisaic judgmentalism. So he placed his preaching of the law in the context of free grace. Grace first, then law. The result of this combination, in this order, is the dynamo that drives Wesleyan spirituality.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“On the one hand, the height and depth of the law constrain me to fly to the love of God in Christ; on the other, the love of God in Christ endears the law to me “above gold or precious stones”; seeing”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Trinitarian theology should never be an attempt to transgress the boundary marked by God’s Word in Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“Salvation is Trinitarian, whether you know it or not; breakthroughs can happen when you move from not knowing to knowing.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“Situating the doctrine of the Trinity within the biblical theology of mystery also requires a more concrete account of the two temporal poles of the biblical mystery. In particular, questions of continuity and discontinuity between Old and New Testaments”
― Fred Sanders, The Triune God

“He preexisted, in the absolute sense of the term. This is not true of any other human beginning, and it is the chief difference between Jesus and the rest of the human family (more foundational than his virgin birth or his sinlessness). All other humans come into existence from a state of nonexistence, and can be said to preexist only in the improper sense that in the hearts of their parents, or in the providence of God, plans and provisions have been made for them. But when it comes to the Son of God, we have a case of actual preexistence. It is not a paradox, for we do not say that Jesus preexists his own existence; we only say that the Son preexists his incarnation. The pre- in the doctrine of the preexistence of Christ points backward from his taking on human nature; that is the event which this person exists pre-.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“Preach our doctrine, inculcate experience, urge practice, enforce discipline. If you preach doctrine alone, the people will be antinomians; if you preach experience only, they will become enthusiasts; if you preach practice only, they will become Pharisees; and if you preach all of these and do not enforce discipline, Methodism will be like a highly cultivated garden without a fence, exposed to the ravages of the wild boar of the forest. 31”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Scripture is not the substitute for God’s drawing nigh to us, it is only the channel; the written Word of the past must become the living Word of the present.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“When evangelicals lose their sense of proportion, they begin to talk as if they no longer care about the character of God unless they get something from it. The best defense against this has always been the doctrine of the eternal Trinity in itself.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“But we should never rush to new-covenant clarity if it means leaving behind old-covenant profundity.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“Evangelicals may have some dysfunctional, subjectivistic ways of expressing this truth, and we may cultivate the experience in shortsighted ways, even using it as a prop for our anti-intellectualism. But we are fundamentally right. This book is a channel through which God himself will meet us again and again in personal encounter. The voice of God in Scripture is the breath of the Spirit carrying the word of the Father. Scorgie”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“the hymns that the Methodists sang, like all effective hymns must be, were emotional, but their content throughout was scriptural and doctrinal. They did not merely stir emotion, but caused their singers to contemplate religious truth and meditate upon it.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love