Northwest Pastor

“Saving belief is not mere mental assent, but a believing in – a living in – the knowledge of that news. It is a leaning on, a relying on. We must come to grips with the fact that we are unable to satisfy God’s demands on us, no matter how morally we try to live. We don’t want to end up trusting a little in ourselves and a little in God; we want to realize that we are to rely on God fully, to trust in Christ alone for our salvation.” -Mark Dever, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism

We need to be communities of love. And we need to be seen to be
communities of love. People need to encounter the church as a network of relationships rather than a meeting you attend or a place you enter. - Total Church by Tim Chester & Steve Timmis

“All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out of the changes that understanding creates in your heart. Faith in the gospel re-structures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting.” - Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God

“The key difference between a Pharisee and a believer in Jesus is inner heart motivation. Pharisees are being good but out of a fearful need to control God. They don’t really trust him or love him. To them God is an exacting boss, not a loving father. Christians have seen something that has transformed their hearts toward God so they can finally love and rest in the Father. . . . Jesus Christ, who had all the power in the world, saw us enslaved by the very things we thought would free us. So he emptied himself of his glory and became a servant (Philippians 2). He laid aside the infinities and the immensities of his being and, at the cost of his life paid the debt for our sins, purchasing us the only place our hearts can rest, in his Father’s house.” Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God

“The redeemed have all their objective good in God. God himself is the great good which they are brought to the possession and enjoyment of by redemption. He is the highest good, and the sum of all that good which Christ has purchased. God is the inheritance of the saints; he is the portion of their souls. God is their wealth and treasure, their food, their life, their dwelling place, their ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honor and glory. They have none in heaven but God; he is the great good which the redeemed are received to at death, and which they are to rise to at the end of the world.

The Lord God, he is the light of the heavenly Jerusalem; and is the ‘the river of the water of life’ that runs, and the tree of life that grows, ‘in the midst of the paradise of God.’ The glorious excellencies and beauty of God will be what will forever entertain the minds of the saints, and the love of God will be their everlasting feast. The redeemed will indeed enjoy other things; they will enjoy the angels, and will enjoy one another: but that which they shall enjoy in the angels, or each other, or in anything else whatsoever, that will yield them delight and happiness, will be what will be seen of God in them.
Jonathan Edwards, “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption,”

Gen. Patraeus said one night in Baghdad. "The first is to get the big ideas right. The second is to communicate the big ideas throughout the organization. The third is to ensure proper execution of the big ideas."

Mark Murford, a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle and no friend of Christianity, described mega-churches:

... the bizarre parallel universe of conservative Christian megachurches, those giant ultra-bland stadium sized fluorescent nightmare warehouses that are still flourishing, more or less, simply because many of them are now dramatically diluting the fire-and-brimstone religion stuff, muting all that thorny theology and eschatology and even the right-wing intolerance ... and replacing it with something resembling, well, a giant cheesy self-help seminar.

With skits. And dance numbers. And a food court. And day care. And an iPod lounge. Self-esteem building exercises. “How to be a winner”. “God has a plan for you”. Only $29.95. Every week. Forever.

“Liberty is both a gift and a task for the Church. The Church may and should be a community of free people: as advocate of Jesus Christ it can never be an institution for domination or, still less, a Grand Inquisition. Its members are freed for freedom: liberated from slavery to the letter of the law, from the burden of guilt, from dread of death; liberated for life, for service, for love—people who are subject to God alone and therefore neither to anonymous powers not to other men. To be sure, faith in the crucified Christ cannot and is not meant to abolish law and power in society; the kingdom of complete freedom is yet to come. But this faith effectively subsumes law and power and completely relativizes them. Faith in the crucified Christ makes man become so free within the scheme of law that he is capable of renouncing a right for the sake of another person without recompense, and even of going two miles with someone who has made him go one. It lets him become so free in society's power struggle that he is capable of using power to his own disadvantage for the sake of another person, and so to give not only his coat but also his cloak. The Christian message, for instance, the words of the Sermon on the Mount, supported by Jesus' life and death, are not meant to set up any new law, to create any new juridical order. The are meant to free men from the law.”— Hans Küng book called "Why Priests: A Proposal for a New Church Ministry"

Southern Baptist theologian J. L. Dagg astutely wrote in 1858 that the apostles “have taught us by example how to organize and govern churches. We have no right to reject their instruction and captiously
insist that nothing but positive command shall bind us. Instead of choosing to walk in a way of our own devising, we should take pleasure to walk in the footsteps of those holy men from whom we have received the word of life . . . respect for the Spirit by which they were led should induce us to prefer their modes of organization and government to such as our inferior wisdom might suggest.”

“We are not called to build the kingdom of glory, but to carry a cross in the kingdom of grace. To forget the cause of missions is to forget the purpose of Christ in a world still spared from destruction. The purpose of your life must be the purpose of Christ’s death.”

- Edmund P. Clowney, Called to the Ministry

Acts 20:26-27 Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, (27) for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.