Steve Stanley > Recent Status Updates

‘If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one,’ says D. A. Carson, ‘it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.’ But however difficult it may be, if we really believe that we all are sinners and that unchecked sin leads to pain and misery and eternal destruction, love will constrain us to give the gift of loving reproof.

One of the most loving things we can do for each other in the church is tell each other when we’re wrong. Call it correction, reproof, or rebuke … but don’t miss what makes it distinctively Christian, and a gift to our souls: It is a great act of love. The kind of rebuke that the Scriptures commend is the kind intended to stop us from continuing on a destructive path.

The key principles of the means of grace are Jesus’s voice (word), his ear (prayer), and his body (church). The various disciplines and practices, then—our habits of grace—are ways of hearing him (his word), and responding (in prayer) to him, in the context of his people (the church).

[We] should not be self-consciously preoccupied with how we’re being strengthened or what grace we’re receiving. Rather, our focus together is the crucified and risen Christ and the incomparable excellencies of his person and work (which illumines all the means of grace and various spiritual disciplines, not only corporate worship—and is why the subtitle of this book begins with “enjoying Jesus”).

Wise and righteous people can never get enough wisdom or knowledge. . . . The truly wise are humble because they know they still have so much to learn. According to [Prov 9:9], wise and righteous people remain teachable. They can learn from anybody, regardless of age or background.

You might think, ‘[Everybody] knows a human being is more valuable than a rock.’ Sure. We know the truth on an emotional and intuitive level. But is there a rational basis for that belief? If there is no God, what’s wrong with harming somebody else? Why is cutting down a person any worse than cutting down a tree? Aren’t they both, in this view, simply entities created randomly by an accident of the universe?

If, however, you believe there is no Creator who made us and that we’re all accidents of nature, I defy you to give a rational basis for the value of human life. Give me a reason for the difference in moral value between a human being and a rock.

An examination of the New Testament word *disciple* reveals that it means to be not only ‘a follower’ of Christ but also ‘a learner.’ . . . To follow Christ and become more like Him, we must engage in the Spiritual Discipline of learning.

To that end, we need to plot something of the historical territory—exactly who and what are we talking about? When we refer to ‘our Reformation heritage,’ we are focusing our attention mostly on the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers and their seventeenth-century post-Reformation successors.

If the main burden of this book is to retrieve a Reformed approach to spiritual formation for the benefit of contemporary Christians, then we need to be clear on just what it is we are attempting to retrieve.

While guarding against an uncharitable ‘anti-Catholicism’ or an unattractive and pinched parochialism, the book aims to demonstrate to evangelical readers that the spiritual depth and seriousness they rightly long for can be found without having to look to Rome or Constantinople.

[Evangelical Christians] are seeking a deeper, more serious Christian expression, a quest that often leads to methods and techniques beyond the boundaries of Reformation Protestantism. A chief goal of the present volume is to speak to what Kenneth Stewart has described as an “evangelical identity crisis’ by pointing readers to the rich Reformation heritage that is already theirs.

Increasing numbers of Christians reared in evangelical churches are disillusioned and frustrated by a religious culture that, at its worst, can seem superficial, shallow, and almost wholly disconnected from the ancient faith that once inspired men and women to bravely go to the lions.

The purpose of this book is . . . to explore and commend a distinctively Reformed Protestant vision of Christian growth for twenty-first-century evangelicals.

Getting away, quiet and alone, is no special grace on its own. But the goal is to create a context for enhancing our hearing from God in his word and responding back to him in prayer.

Private prayer shows who we really are spiritually *and* is essential in healing the many places we find ourselves broken, needy, lacking, and rebellious.

Typically the best way to grow and make headway is not a total overhaul, but identifying one or a couple small changes that will pay dividends over time.

Science can tell you what *is*, but it can never tell you what *ought to be.*

Principles have power with us when we see them embodied in persons whom we admire.

Plainly, [Puritans] did not believe that God sent them, or sends anyone, to tell congregations that God requires everyone to receive Christ at the close of the sermon.

Formally from pulpits and informally in personal counselling, [Puritans] highlighted the present duty of the unconverted to seek Christ; but they did not see this as implying a present capacity to receive Christ savingly, and so one does not find them commanding all the unconverted to ‘decide for Christ’...on the spot, or making appeals in which they profess to be ‘giving them an opportunity’ to make this decision.