Robert Murray McCheyne on Pastoring

He loved his flock more than he loved his fame.

Michael Bird on Gospel

The gospel is both a revelation from God (Gal 1:12) and is about what God himself has done in the faithfulness, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. To tell the gospel of God is to tell the story of Jesus. And yet the story of Jesus is entirely inexplicable apart from the story of God. Paul is the quintessential Jesus-freak, but he is not a mono-Jesus adherent. That is because God, Son, and Spirit all figure prominently in his opening narration of the gospel story in Rom 1:1-4. In fact, Romans is the most theocentric letter of the Pauline corpus with the word theos occurring 153 times! John Webster rightly states: ?The matter to which Christian theology is commanded to attend, and by which it is directed in all its operations, is the presence of the perfect God as it is announced in the gospel."

Carl F. Henry on Gospel

The Gospel is only good news if it gets there in time.

Andrew Wilson on Pride

People would rather be independent and miserable than humble and happy.

W.E. Henly on Pride

It matters not how straight the gates
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

Iain Murray on Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Dr Lloyd-Jones believed that neglect of the work of the Spirit in relation to preaching was often connected with mistaken belief. Some held that the indwelling of the Spirit in all Christians leaves no need for believers to seek His Presence; others seemed to believe that the Spirit rests equally on all orthodox ministry.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones regarded this as contrary to Scripture. Why was the commands "to be filled with the Spirit" if His indwelling which takes place at regeneration is sufficient? What sense could there be in the apostolic direction to appoint men "full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom" if His fullness marks all Christians?

While there is mystery in the mode of the Spirit's Presence, it is surely clear that His work is not static but ongoing and repeated".

William Wilberforce on Joy

Joy is enjoined on us as our bounden duty and commended to us as acceptable worship.

May on Psalms

Book of Psalms is a virtual compendium of themes and topics found in the rest of the Old Testament. The marvelous works of God in creation, judgment, and salvation, Israel's story, the law of life, the Holy City and the Presence there, the once and future Davidic messiah, warning against wickedness and exhortation to righteousness, the majesty and tragedy of the human condition, the everlasting and present and coming kingdom of God all belong to the agenda of the psalms

Paul Miller on Prayer

Miller asserts that ?Jesus was the most dependent human being who ever lived.? Why? Because his entire sense of self is not self-reliant, self-centered. Rather, Jesus is because the Father and the Spirit are.

Unlike us, ?Jesus has no separate sense of self, he has no identity crisis, no angst. Consequently, he doesn?t try to ?find himself?. He knows himself only in relationship with his Father. He can?t conceive of himself outside of that relationship.

Richard Lovelace on Prayer

The proportion of horizontal communication that goes on in the church (in planning, arguing, and expounding) is overwhelmingly greater than that which is vertical (in worship, thanksgiving, confession and intercession?The old midweek prayer meetings for revival have vanished from the programs of most churches or have been transformed into Bible studies ending with minimal prayer. - Dynamics of Spiritual Life, 153

Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Worship

We are so decorous, we are so controlled, we do everything with such decency and order that there is no life, no power, no warmth and it isn't New Testament Christianity! That's why the world is outside!

Paulo Coelho on Church

The ship is safest when it's in port. But that's not what ships were made for.

Bernard of Clairvaux on Love

There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others: that is vanity. There are those who seek knowledge to serve: that is love.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Discipleship

Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without disipleship is always Christianity without Christ.

Leonard Sweet on Worship

Postmodern culture yearns for corporate worship that is EPIC: experiential, participatory, image driven, and communal.

Mark Driscoll on Worship

Everything in the service needs to preach: architecture, lighting, songs, prayers, fellowship, the smell, it all preaches.. To experience God is often the highest form of knowing and the entire worship experience must be more than a presentation about God.

Karl Barth on Fellowship

When we speak of our virtues we are competitors, when we confess our sins we become brothers.

Robert Banks on Church

The church is described as belonging not to the people by whom it is constituted.. nor to the district to which they belong.. but rather to the one who has brought it into existence (God) or the one through whom this has taken place (Christ).

Jonathan Campbell on Missional Church

God's strategy for building his kingdom is through the growing and multiplication of missional communities... The church is to share the good news of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit among all the social groupings and gather those who respond into disciple-making communities. New churches flow naturally out of disciple-making in the community context.

Michael Frost on Missional Church

If they won't come to us, we have to go to them... Instead of asking non-Christians to come-to-us (attractional)... the incarnational church seeks to infiltrate society to represent Christ in the world.

Ivan Illich on Change

Ivan Illich was once asked what is the most revolutionary way to change society. Is it violent revolution or is it gradual reform? He gave a careful answer. Neither. If you want to change society, than you must tell an alternative story.

John Gladwin on Postmodern Church

The postmodern, or emerging, church will have these four features in common:

1. Focus on the journey of faith and the experience of God.

2. Desire for less structure and more direct involvement by participants.

3. Sense of flexibility in order and a distinctly non-hierarchical culture.

4. Recognition that the experience of church is about the sustaining of discipleship.

Michael Frost on Mission

Living out the gospel within its cultural context rather than perpetuating an institutional commitment apart from its cultural context.

Robert Banks on Christian Living

Ten worrying ways in which the gap between belief and everyday life shows in our churches:

1. Few of us apply or know how to apply our belief to our work, or lack of work.

2. We only make minimal connections between our faith and our spare time activities.

3. We have little sense of a Christian approach to regular activities like domestic chores.

4. Our everyday attitudes are partly shaped by the dominant values of our society.

5. Many of our spiritual difficulties stem from the daily pressure we experience (lack of time, exhaustion, family pressures, etc).

6. Our everyday concerns receive little attention in the church.

7. Only occassionally do professional theologians address routine activities.

8. When addressed, everyday issues tend to be approached too theoretically.

9. Only a minority of Christians read religious books or attend theological courses.

10. Most churchgoers actually reject the idea of a gap between their beliefs and their ways of life.

Michael Frost on Mission

Essentially the early church was a missional movement to its core. It understood that personal conversion implied the embracing of the missio dei - the redemptive mission of God to the whole world through the work of his Messiah.

John Drane on Modernity

No persecutor or foe in two thousand years has wreaked such havoc on the church as has modernity.

Jonathan Dodson on Church Planting

Here are the Stages of Growth we followed as a Missional Core Team (see separate document Stages of Organic Growth for further explanation)

Meals & Mission: time spent cultivating community over shared meals, missional conversation, and being on mission together socially and evangelistically.

Vision & Mission: time spent in community discussions around vision and values, while continuing to practice mission.

Commitment Night: an evening in which I gave a charge, we prayed for our city, had first communion over a meal, and celebrated God’s work in our Core Team.

Bible Study & Mission: spent time teaching through Luke-Acts, identifying the themes and challenges of gospel, community, mission.

Strategy & Missional Community: time spent in more strategic conversation and planning to be a church in the city and for the city through what came to be called City Groups (aka Missional Communities).

Low Profile Public Gatherings: our first public gatherings which included preaching and primarily built up the existing Core Team

High Profile Public Gatherings: our first attractional, public gatherings in a city centre location

City Groups Multiply: existing City Groups multiply through mission and leadership development

Albert Einstein on Problem Solving

The kind of thinking that will solve the world's problems will be of a different order to the kind of thinking that created those problems in the first place.

C.S. Lewis on Worship

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him

John Piper on Fasting

Fasting poses the question: do we miss him? How hungry are we for him to come? The almost universal absence of regular fasting for the Lord’s return is a witness to our satisfaction with the presence of the world and the absence of the Lord. This is not the way it should be. In Luke 18:7–8 Jesus says, “Shall not God bring about justice for His elect, who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them?”
. . .This is what is missing in the comfortable Christian Church of the modern world. Where in the West do Christians cry to Christ day and night that he would come and bring about justice for his elect? Where is there that kind of longing and aching for the consummation of the kingdom? It is no surprise then, that the question of fasting for the coming of the Bridegroom is scarcely asked. If the cry itself is not there, why would one even think of expressing it with fasting?

William Booth on Mission

If I believed what you Christians believe, I would not rest day or night from telling people about it.

John Murray on Redemption

“Redemption accomplished” is Jesus being our “double cure” who saves us from the wrath of God and makes us pure before God. As our substitute, Jesus died the death we should have died for breaking God’s law, and he fulfilled the law on our behalf. His righteousness is given to us as if we had fulfilled the law. That is redemption accomplished.
“Redemption applied” is the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and this ministry is “missional.” The Spirit continues and expands the ministry of Jesus. The Gospels are accounts of Jesus’ ministry through the power of the Spirit. At age 30, Jesus was baptized by John, and the Holy Spirit came down upon him and anointed him for his ministry. The book of Acts is the extension of Jesus’ ministry through earlier believers. After Jesus’ resurrection and just before his ascension, Jesus said to his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

Burroughs on Devil

The Devil is the most discontented creature in the world, he is the proudest creature that is, and the most discontented creature, and the most dejected creature. Now, therefore, so much discontent as you have, so much of the spirit of Satan you have

Richard Lovelace on Gospel

Since their understanding of justification is marginal or unreal—anchored not to Christ, but to some conversion experience in the past or to an imagined present state of goodness in their lives—they know little of the dynamic of justification. Their understanding of sin focuses upon behavioral externals which they can eliminate from their lives by a little will power and ignores the great submerged continents of pride, covetousness and hostility beneath the surface.

John Piper on Preaching

“My understanding of preaching is music without the music.” (from the WorshipGod09 message, “The Heart of Worship“)

One thing’s clear: John Piper is doing more than simply talking about God—he’s experiencing him. I guess that’s why he says preaching is meant to be “expository exultation.”

John Piper on Worship

“God is glorified in his people by the way we experience him, not merely by the way we think about him.” (When I Don’t Desire God, 30)

Strong affections for God, rooted in and shaped by the truth of Scripture - this is the bone and marrow of biblical worship. (Desiring God, 81)

“Godly people are seen yearning, longing, hungering, thirsting, and fainting for God. They are also seen enjoying, delighting in, and being satisfied in God.” (When I Don’t Desire God, 24)

Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Holy Spirit

But the danger is to think of the baptism of the Holy Spirit only in terms of gifts rather than in terms of something much more important, which is this: the mark, ultimately, and proof of whether we have received the Spirit or not is surely something that happens in the realm of our spiritual experience. You cannot read the New Testament accounts of the people to whom the Spirit came, these people upon whom He fell, or who received as the Galation Christians and all these others had done, without realizing that the result was that their whole spirit was kindled. The Lord Jesus Christ became real to them in a way that He had never been before . . . the result was a great love for Christ shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Jonathan Dodson on Mission

Familiarity with the gospel breeds missional contempt. If we know the gospel as a set of spiritual facts and a code of morality, then we have very little use for the Church and her mission, the community and evangelism. But if the Gospel is deeper and more honest than we have imagined, then we must be desperate for more. More gospel talk from our friends, more gospel community from church, more gospel songs with fellow saints, and more gospel news for our neighbors. If the gospel is this great, then is must be shared. What we need is not gospel familiarity but gospel depth.

John Piper on the Holy Spirit

The baptism of the Spirit (Acts 2:16) or the receiving of the gift of the Spirit (v 17) cannot be the same as the work of God before faith which enables faith. The baptism in the Spirit is an experience of the Spirit given after faith to faith.

John Piper on the Holy Spirit

When you read the New Testament honestly, you can't help but get the impression of a big difference from a lot of contemporary Christian experience. For them the Holy Spirit was a fact of experience. For many Christians today it is a fact of doctrine.

John Owen on Assurance

Where there is not an inward experience of the power, virtue, and effectual power of gospel truths in their hearts, those living under a profession of religion, regardless of what they profess, are very near to atheism, or at least exposed to great temptations in that direction.