Benjamin Glaser

“It is in this sense that Paul links Hagar to Sinai. Both Hagar and Sinai in their divinely intended places served well; but when they were elevated to positions whereby they were used to achieve the promise, they could only fail. By drawing the analogy between Hagar and Sinai, Paul makes it clear that God never intended the law to be the means of attaining salvation for ancient Israel. To define God’s purpose for the law in terms of how unbelievers used the law is most assuredly wrong. When the law is kept in the place that God intended, it serves grace well, both by leading men to Christ and by showing believers how to live in grace. For Israel in either the Old or the New Testament dispensation (in Moses’s day or in Paul’s day) to so misuse the law was to put themselves in bondage and their souls in eternal jeopardy.”
― Michael P.V. Barrett, Beginning at Moses: A Guide to Finding Christ in the Old Testament

“Let me tell you one story to illustrate what I mean. I remember a woman who was a spiritist, and even a medium, a paid medium employed by a spiritist society. She used to go every Sunday evening to a spiritist meeting and was paid three guineas for acting as a medium. This was during the thirties, and that was quite a large sum of money for a lower middle-class woman. She was ill one Sunday and could not go to keep her appointment. She was sitting in her house and she saw people passing by on their way to the church where I happened to be ministering in South Wales. Something made her feel a desire to know what those people had, and so she decided to go to the service, and did. She came ever afterwards until she died, and became a very fine Christian. One day I asked her what she had felt on that first visit, and this is what she said to me; and this is the point I am illustrating. She said, 'The moment I entered your chapel and sat down on a seat amongst the people I was conscious of a power. I was conscious of the same sort of power as I was accustomed to in our spiritist meetings, but there was one big difference; I had a feeling that the power in your chapel was a clean power.' The point I am making is simply this, that she was aware of a power. This is this mysterious element. It is the presence of the Spirit in the heart of God's children, God's people, and an outsider becomes aware of this. This is something you can never get if you just sit and read a book on your own. The Spirit can use a book, I know, but because of the very constitution of man's nature -our gregarious character, and the way in which we lean on one another, and are helped by one another even unconsciously- this is a most important factor. That is so in a natural sense, but when the Spirit is present, it is still more so. I am not advocating a mob or a mass psychology which I regard as extremely dangerous, particularly when it is worked up. All I am contending for is that when you enter a church, a society, a company of God' s people, there is a factor which immediately comes into operation, which is reinforced still more by the preacher expounding the Word in the pulpit; and that is why preaching can never be replaced by either reading or by watching television or anyone of these other activities.”
― Martyn Lloyd-Jones