Quote 4914
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How easy it is to read the Scriptures and give a kind of nominal assent to the truth and yet never to appropriate what it tells us!
O my soul, is it possible for thee to hear the excellency of Scripture thus opened to thee, and not to burn in love to it? Hast thou been all this while in such a host bath, and still cold and shivering?The Christian Man\'s Calling
A Christian without a Bible is a soldier without a weapon.The Christian\'s Reasonable Service 1:76
God will condemn those by his Word, who will not judge themselves by it.
We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.
Do not look for the Church nearest to your house. Look for the Church closest to the Bible.
The body of Scripture is a doctrine sufficient to live well. It comprehends many holy sciences of which one is principal, and the others are handmaids or attendants.https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/perkins/A%20Golden%20Chain%20-%20William%20Perkins.pdf
Christians need to remember that the sufficiency of Scripture gives us a comprehensive worldview that equips us to wrestle with even the most challenging ethical dilemmas of our time.
In short, I will preach it [the Word], teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.
The collapse in evangelical doctrinal consensus is intimately related to the collapse in the understanding of, and role assigned to, Scripture as God's Word spoken within the church.Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Many have and many do miserably pervert the Scriptures by turning them into vain and groundless allegories. Some wanton wits have expounded Paradise to be the soul, man to be the mind, the woman to be the sense, the serpent to be delight, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to be wisdom, and the rest of the trees to be the virtues and endowments of the mind. O friends! It is dangerous to bring in allegories where the Scripture doth not clearly and plainly warrant them and to take those words figuratively which should be taken properly.
The reading of the Scriptures is nothing else but a kind of holy conference with God, wherein we inquire after and He reveals unto us Himself and His will; we shall manifest more fully hereafter, when we shall show that these holy writings are the Word of God Himself, who speaks unto us in and by them. Wherefore when we take in hand the book of the Scriptures, we cannot otherwise conceive of ourselves then as standing in God's presence to hear what He will say unto us. Way to the Tree of Life
He that is mighty in Scripture is the man that can hit this unclean bird in the eye and wound it mortally with one blow (Acts 18:28). Even women, that are the weaker sex, with this sword in their hands, having learned from the Spirit how to use it, have encountered with great doctors, disarmed them of all their philosophical weapons, and shamefully foiled them.
Jewels do not lie upon the surface; you must get into the caverns and dark receptacles of the earth for them. No more do truths lie in the surface and outside of an expression. The beauty and glory of the Scriptures is within and must be fetched out with much study and prayer.
The testimony of the church is highly to be reverenced because to it are these oracles of God delivered to be kept as a sacred deposit; yea, it is called "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. 3:15) and the candlestick (Rev. 1:12) from whence the light of the Scriptures shines forth into the world. But who will say that the proclamation of a prince hath its authenticity from the pillar it hangs on in the market cross or that the candle hath its light from the candlestick! The office of the church is ministerial, to publish and make known the word of God; but not magisterial and absolute to make it Scripture or unmake it, as she is pleased to allow or deny.
The reading of the Scriptures with general instructions, admonitions, reprehensions, exhortations, and consolations I grant are most necessary, being the groundwork and matter of the cure. But what sound conversion is wrought thereby in any man, without discreet application, let every man that hath profited anything in the school of Christ be judge.
When a man's mind is empty, as in temptation and want of comfort, it is empty of Christ and full of fear. Then it grinds itself, as in a quern or mill when empty of corn, one stone grinds another. The more full a man's mind is, the more free from temptations and fears. Now Scripture matter is the most filling matter.
Whatsoever Satan or conscience say, do not conclude against thyself. Christ shall have the last word. He is judge of quick and dead and must pronounce the final sentence. His blood speaks reconciliation (1 Cor. 1:20), cleansing (1 John 1:7), purchase (Acts 20:28), redemption (1 Peter 1:18–19), purging (Heb. 9:14, 18), remission (Eph. 1:7), liberty (Heb. 10:19), justification (Rom. 5:9), nighness to God (Eph. 2:18). Not a drop of this blood shall be lost. Choice Drop of Honey, 16
To be strangers to the word of God, little conversant in it, and to make little use of it, is a great affront done to God. We should acquaint ourselves not with the letter only, as little children learn it by rote, but with the sense and purpose of ithttps://www.monergism.com/rich-young-ruler-exposition-mark-1017-27-ebook
There arises, I confess, some darkness in the scriptures, because of the idiomatic nature, figurative ornaments, and unfamiliar use of the tongues. But that difficulty may easily be helped by study, diligence, faith, and the means of skillful interpreters. I know that the apostle Peter says that in the epistles of Paul "many things are hard to understand." 2Pet 3.16 But he immediately adds, "which the unlearned, and those who are imperfect or unstable, pervert, as they do the other scriptures also, to their own destruction." By this we gather that the scripture is difficult or obscure to the unlearned, unskillful, unexercised, and malicious or corrupted wills, and not to the zealous and godly readers or hearers of it.The Decades, https://www.monergism.com/decades-ebook
let none of us say hereafter, "Why do I need to care what is written to the Jews in the old Testament, or what the apostles have written to the Romans, to the Corinthians, and to other nations? I am a Christian. The prophets both preached and wrote to the men of their time, and the apostles to those who lived in the same age with them." For if we think uprightly of the matter, we will see that the scriptures of the old and new Testaments should therefore be received by us, even because we are Christians. For Christ, our Saviour and Master, referred us to the written books of Moses and the prophets.The Decades, https://www.monergism.com/decades-ebook
whoever is ignorant of what the word of God is, and the meaning of the word of God, seems like one who is blind, deaf, and without wit, in the temple of the Lord, in the school of Christ, and lastly, in the reading of the very sacred scriptures.https://www.monergism.com/decades-ebook
Leave not off reading in the Bible till you find your hearts warmed... Let it not only inform you, but to inflame you
Be thankful to God for the scriptures. What a mercy is it that God has not only acquainted us what his will is, but that he has made it known by writing!A Body of Divinity, p37
There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard.The Doctrine of the Word of God
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