Notable Quotes 5

I am glad you know when persons are justified. It is a lesson I have not yet learnt. There are so many stony ground hearers, that receive the Word with joy, that I have determined to suspend my judgment till I know the tree by its fruits… The way the Spirit of God takes, is like that we take in preparing the ground: do you think any farmer would have a crop of corn next year unless they plow now; and you may as well expect a crop of corn on unplowed ground, as a crop of grace, until the soul is convinced of its being undone without a Saviour. That is the reason we have so many mushroom converts, so many persons that are always happy! happy! happy! and never were miserable; why? Because their stony ground is not plowed up; they have not got a conviction of the law; they are stony ground hearers; they hear the word with joy, and in a time of temptation, which will soon come after a seeming or real conversion, they fall away. They serve Christ as the young man served the Jews that lay hold of him, who, when he found he was like to be a prisoner for following Christ, left his garments; and so some people leave their profession. That makes me so cautious now, which I was not thirty years ago, of dubbing converts so soon. I love now to wait a little, and see if people bring forth fruit; for there are so many blossoms which March winds you know blow away, that I cannot believe they are converts till I see fruit brought forth. It will do converts no harm to keep them a little back; it will never do a sincere soul any harm. – George Whitefield

Corpses Don't Have Felt Needs

In my area there is an insurance company who runs two incredibly opposite ads. One depicts a man who gets off with what appears to be murder and the other an altruistic claim to love helping those in need. Maybe I’m just more cynical than most people, but I can’t help but notice the absolute lack of substance in either commercial. The message of both ads is absolutely irrelevant: they are both pieces of rhetoric intended to drum up business. Almost all marketing is like this, I know, but these two ads by the same people for the same product, exemplify this in a higher degree than anything else I’ve ever seen.

Of course, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. My interest is in this whole phenomenon of communication without substance. I am bothered because this is the model adopted by so many “evangelism” techniques of our day. Every attempt is made to find some catchy idea or buzz word that will resonate with hearers and address a “felt need,” assuming that this is what will get them to come to God. Precious little of modern evangelism contains any content. Feeling and emotion are what is addressed. Lost men’s greatest need is the one they never feel: their being dead in sin. Corpses don’t have felt needs because they don’t feel.

Let me backtrack a second and address a popular misconception. Reformed people are often accused of being droll, boring and emotionless. No doubt there are Arminians who are boring too. Theology has nothing to do with that. But it is wrong to assume that Reformed theology is emotionless because we speak against this appeal to emotions and feelings. Right out of the box, the Heidelberg Catechism tells us that we will feel gratitude to God when we understand how great our sin and misery are and how great a salvation Christ has accomplished for us. Gratitude is an emotion.

Secondly, Reformed worship feels boring to Arminians and Pentecostal types in particular, because they are used to a form of “worship” that has zero doctrinal content and is aimed at nothing else but stimulating emotions. Granted, this is more fun that being intellectually challenged, but it is not the Biblical way to address people.

Consider for a moment the times in Paul’s epistles when he breaks out in a joyful burst of emotion in praise to God. What prompted this? Was it a string of feelings-targeted statements accompanied by moving emotion-charged music? No. It was his response to dense, closely argued theological truth. That is the biblical model. Evading contact with the mind in order to get emotions whipped up – this is little more than a parlor trick. And yet this is all that most of contemporary Christian preaching, literature and music is. We now have churches full of people who live on fortune cookie slogans instead of sound doctrine.

Doctrine Is Not Important If Continuists Are Right

Acts 15:6-21 tells us of the Jerusalem Council which was convened to sort out the question of the relationship of Jews and Gentiles in the Church. Circumcision was more specifically the issue addressed, but the acceptance of Gentiles into the covenant community was the underlying issue. With regard to the inclusion of Gentiles, an argument is made from the ministries of Peter and Paul and the experience of their Gentile converts. In verse 8, Peter makes the explicit claim that the former distinction between Jew and Gentile must no longer exist because God has given the Holy Spirit to the Gentile converts in the exact same validating way that He gave to them. In other words, God has validated these converts; therefore, whatever differences between them which the Jews thought to be important must actually be insignificant

That is why I am so hard-line regarding the correctness of Cessationism. Peter agued the validity of Cornelius' salvation because his household experienced the same outpouring of the spirit that the Apostles did on Pentecost. Continuists, if they are going to be consistent, will recognize anyone (Oneness, Romanist, Greek Orthodox, Mormon, whatever) as long as they can attest to the same spiritual gifts. They reason that if God isn't concerned enough about their doctrine to withhold Holy Ghost baptism, then surely these doctrinal differences must be insignificant. Before the so-called Charismatic renewal, no self-respecting evangelical would be caught dead “fellowshipping” with Roman Catholics. Now all this has changed. The existence of Charismatic Catholics has removed the barrier created by pesky little doctrines like worshipping, or praying to the saints, Transubstantiation, Purgatory, and image worship. That is why TBN is riddled with screwballs. Tongues-speaking, prophecy and words of knowledge are the equalizers for them. If they can do these things, nothing else matters.

They are wrong, wrong, wrong; but their logic is accurate. If these spiritual manifestations are genuine, then God must not care about their doctrine, because He is validating their ministries with His power. If it really is the Holy Spirit at work among the denizens of TBN, then we have no other option but to accept that God doesn’t mind Benny Hinn’s 9-person deity, or the manifold other blasphemies of the Word of Faith crowd. If God is truly passing out powerful manifestations of His Spirit to image-worshipping papists, then who are we to be more persnickety about doctrine than God? Of course, this leaves us only one of two alternatives: accept Continuism, or insist, correctly, on Cessationism.

As Reformed Cessationists, we affirm that all of the so-called manifestations of spiritual gifts among Charismatics of all stripes are in fact, false. God does not violate His own Word. He has emphatically closed the canon of Scripture with the book of Revelation. We can therefore rule out of hand that anything which emanates from, relies on, or promotes the existence and/or exercise of any one of the revelatory sign gifts is simply fraudulent.

With Man It Is Impossible

“Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible…”

This passage, if read honestly, proves to be the bullet in the brain of Arminianism. The context, of course, is the story of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19:16-30. Much ridiculous speculation has been done about the ‘eye of the needle.” One such attempt to soften the blow of Christ’s words is to render it “cable” instead of “camel,” as if threading a needle with a cable were easier than running a camel through it! Others have emasculated the text by proposing some imaginary gateway into Jerusalem to be the “eye of the needle.” These ideas are clearly wrong because the miss the absoluteness of the impossibility. The disciples’ response gives us the clue that this is how the impossibility is to be understood. They cry out in astonishment: “Who then can be saved?”

Surely this is beside the point. The point Jesus makes, as evidenced by the Disciples’ response, is not how much money one can have before it becomes a hindrance to entering heaven. The point is that “salvation is of the Lord” (Jonah 2:9). Unless God does what is impossible for men, it doesn’t get done. End of story.

Notice that Jesus does not say, “With men it is difficult;” or, “With men it requires a sincere effort;” or “With men it hinges upon their decision.” No, friend. It is as blunt, succinct and as concise as language can express it: It is impossible.

“Impossibility is the sphere of God’s activity,” says Warfield. Which means only one thing: If God doesn’t save you, you don’t get saved. One of the most widely quoted sayings also happens to one of the stupidest: God helps those who help themselves. Wrong! This assumes that anyone can actually help himself. This Scripture bluntly denies. Moreover, the common understanding of the saying that we have to act to show God that we’re serious so that He will help us is a misunderstanding of the saying’s original meaning. It was coined by a Cynic philosopher who meant by it to say that people do things for themselves, then give an imaginary god the credit for that which they have actually done for themselves. This reminds me of Robert Kennedy’s quote, “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” The source of this statement is actually George Bernard Shaw’s play “Back to Methuselah,” and the speaker is Satan! Talk about ‘out of context!’

Look again at something in the passage. Note the expressions used regarding salvation: “inherit the kingdom of heaven,” “enter the kingdom of God,” and “be saved.” We have here in this passage what appears to me to be the strongest Scriptural statement of the doctrine of inability. Any way you choose to phrase, whether it be inheriting the kingdom of heaven, whether it be entering the kingdom of God, or if it be being saved, Christ has one response: “With men it is impossible.” And because it is impossible for man to do, it is not to be done by man at all. The doctrine of inability leads us smack-dab into the doctrine of imputed righteousness. It is impossible for man to do anything tending to his own salvation, therefore God, with Whom all things are possible, must do it. The good news is that in Christ, God has done all righteousness for the elect. Their salvation hinges on nothing that they have, will or can do.

Notable Quotes 4

To begin with the passage where He says that He is come to ‘to seek and to save that which is lost.’ What do you suppose that to be which is lost? Man, undoubtedly. The entire man, or only a part of him? The whole man, of course. In fact, since the transgression which caused man's ruin was committed quite as much by the instigation of the soul from concupiscence as by the action of the flesh from actual fruition, it has marked the entire man with the sentence of transgression, and has therefore made him deservedly amenable to perdition.

Tertullian, Res. Carn.