Tom Agnew > Tom's Quotes

“The gospel is preached in the ears of all men; it only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher otherwise men would be converters of souls. Nor does it lie in the preacher’s learning; otherwise it could consists of the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it – the Holy Ghost changing the will of man. O Sirs! We might as well preach to stone walls as preach to humanity unless the Holy Ghost be with the word, to give it power to convert the soul.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“It does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend, as well as preaching, to give a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word, in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of religion, their own misery, the necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; to stir up the pure minds of the saints, quicken their affections by often bringing the great things of religion in their remembrance, and setting them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already. ”
― Jonathan Edwards

“I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.”
― Richard Baxter

“To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify it, to set it free, and to save it, if it believes the preaching.”
― Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty

“Preach [and live] as if Jesus was crucified yesterday, rose from the dead today, and is returning tomorrow.”
― Martin Luther

“When a poor soul is somewhat awakened by the terrors of the Lord, then the poor creature, being born under the covenant of works, flies directly to a covenant of works again. And as Adam and Eve hid themselves… and sewed fig leaves… so the poor sinner, when awakened, flies to his duties and to his performances, to hide himself from God, and goes to patch up a righteousness of his own. Says he, I will be mighty good now–I will reform–I will do all I can; and then certainly Jesus Christ will have mercy on me.”
― George Whitefield, The Method of Grace. a Sermon, Preached on Sabbath Morning, September 13th, 1741. in the High-Church-Yard of Glasgow, ... by ... George Whitefield.

“Give me 100 preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God; such alone will shake the gates of hell.”
― John Wesley

“Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts... It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.”
― Timothy Keller

“Jesus was not revolutionary because he said we should love God and each other. Moses said that first. So did Buddha, Confucius, and countless other religious leaders we've never heard of. Madonna, Oprah, Dr. Phil, the Dali Lama, and probably a lot of Christian leaders will tell us that the point of religion is to get us to love each other. "God loves you" doesn't stir the world's opposition. However, start talking about God's absolute authority, holiness, ... Christ's substitutionary atonement, justification apart from works, the necessity of new birth, repentance, baptism, Communion, and the future judgment, and the mood in the room changes considerably.”
― Michael S. Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“Repentance is not subsequent to belief; it is part of belief. It is belief in action-choice that flow out of conviction. Repentance literally means "a change of mind" (in Greek, metanoia; meta-"new", noia="mind") about Jesus. Repentance is not merely changing your action; it is changing your actions because you have changed your attitude about Jesus' authority and glory.”
― J.D. Greear, Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved

“One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century

“The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, No Little People

“Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be *chosen* after a careful consideration of which worldview is true.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ... , the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

“God does not measure the precepts of his law by human strength, but, after ordering what is right, freely bestows on his elect the power of fulfilling it.”
― John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

“John Calvin comments on today’s passage: “God is only rightly served when his law is obeyed. It is not left to every man to frame a system of religion according to his own judgment, but the standard of godliness is to be taken from the Word of God.”
― Anonymous

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”
― Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“The resurrection completes the inauguration of God's kingdom. . . . It is the decisive event demonstrating thet God's kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven."

"The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.”
― N. T. Wright

“Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come.”
― J. I. Packer