D. A. Carson quotes:

Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.

No one believes more strongly than I do that every Christian should be a theologian. In that sense, we all need to work it out. I want all Christians who can read, to read their Bibles and to read beyond the Bible - to read the history and theology.

There needs to be a place in the church or just outside - there needs to be a place where people feel free to ask questions without being put upon, where they feel free to ask difficult, challenging questions to voice their skepticism.

The Gospel itself is angular. It always has been. It always conflicts. It always challenges every generation. It challenges different generations in different ways.

Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ

How much would our churches be transformed if each of us made it a practice to thank God for others and then to tell those others what it is about them that we thank God for?

I do think that there is a hunger in the land for a vision of confessional Christianity that is robust, God-centered, tough-minded, able to address today and tomorrow and the next day, and comprehensive.

We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb.

To worship God 'in spirit and in truth' is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows are being swept away (Hebrews 8:13). Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship.

Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God's love, they cannot escape the cross.

God is a talking God, and thus you must come to wrestle with him. You must wrestle with what he said.

... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.

The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him.

Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.

You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.

The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin

It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.

Draw nigh to God, so that you may dread the grave as little as your bed. Draw nigh to God, that you may live a happy and useful life. Drawing nigh to God is the most concentrated energy of the soul. Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.

All of us would be wiser if we would resolve never to put people down, except on our prayer lists.

Some forms of absolutism are not bad; they may even be heroic.

The cliché, God hates the sin but love the sinner, is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and on the sinner (John 3:36).

The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.

The broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity.

The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.

A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.

The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it.

What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus' sake.

When you are converted, you want to do what you didn't want to do before, and you don't want to do what you wanted to do before. There's a change in the heart; there's a cleaning up, a change in orientation, and holiness becomes attractive, instead of something you have to put up with to figure out what you can get away with. As long as young people are asking, 'Can I get away with this?' or 'Can I get away with that?' I wonder if they're regenerate. If they're asking, instead, 'How can I grow in holiness?' then I suspect they've begun to understand.

Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.

...sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances, rather than change our circumstances.

The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God's story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible.

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher's sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity.

Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.

Jesus is hungry but feeds others; He grows weary but offers others rest; He is the King Messiah but pays tribute; He is called the devil but casts out demons; He dies the death of a sinner but comes to save His people from their sins; He is sold for thirty pieces of silver but gives His life a ransom for many; He will not turn stones to bread for Himself but gives His own body as bread for people.

Wrath, unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God's holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath-but there will always be love in God. Where God in His holiness confronts His image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the jealous God He claims to be, and His holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God's wrath is diminishing God's holiness.

We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray.

If the text is God's Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience.

A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.

Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.

True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us

Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship, worship rather than worship God.

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.

Effectiveness in teaching the Bible is purchased at the price of much study, some of it lonely, all of it tiring.

Some people say What's the use of the term if it has to be so fully documented and constrained and footnoted and all the rest. My response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc. Any term can be distorted or domesticated or fly off the handle because of another alien philosophical structure that's imposed on the text and so on. Inerrancy is no different from what we find in every other theologically loaded word.

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced.

Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death.

The New Testament writers did not invent a doctrine of Scripture they inherited it.

Do you wish to see God's love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God's wrath? Look at the cross.

"Biblical theology" refers to something more precise than theology that is faithful to the Bible. It might be helpful to draw a contrast: at the risk of oversimplification, systematic theology tends to organize theology topically and with an eye cast on its contemporary relevance, while biblical theology tends to organize the same biblical material so that it is easier to see the distinctive contribution of each biblical book and human author, and to trace the trajectories of themes across the Bible so we see how the books of the Bible hold together.

Love the church because Jesus loves it.

Either worrying drives out prayer, or prayer drives out worrying.

The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.

The truth of the matter is that inerrancy is simply a way of saying that there are no errors that call into question the truthfulness of Scripture wherever Scripture is making truth claims.

God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never mitigates human responsibility.

Prayer is God's appointed means for appropriating the blessings that are ours in Christ Jesus.

That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble.

Authority can mean different things to different people. For example, some document or other may be authoritative for particular group even though it's not reliable. It's just that the group has accepted that document as authoritative for their group. And some documents are truthful and reliable but they are ignored, so they have no authority for that particular group.

There is no long-range effective teaching of the Bible that is not accompanied by long hours of ongoing study of the Bible.

The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.

In terms of applicability to today's world, many people are trying to domesticate Scripture so as to get the PC answer, the politically correct answer on a wide range of subjects, whether it's homosexual marriage, or a certain view of government, or a certain view of eschatology or whatever. At the end of the day we want also to encourage the kind of reverent handling of Scripture that wants to be corrected by Scripture, that is more eager to be mastered by Scripture then to master it.

Justice is not always done in this world; we see that everyday. But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying, "This isn't fair."

Others have questions about how it is that God and human beings can both be speaking through the one document such that you can see and read the personalities of the human authors with their individual vocabularies and literary genres, and yet this is nevertheless the word of God. How can that be? This is quite a contrast with Islam, for example, which holds that the Koran has been dictated in Arabic by God and as a result Mohammed is nothing more than the one who memorizes the word so as to pass it on. There is nothing of human contribution.

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

Sex is about timing. The world says: any time, any place. God says: my time, my place.

The way you lose the gospel is not by denying it, but by assuming it.

It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.

In any Christian view of life, self-fulfillment must never be permitted to become the controlling issue. The issue is service, the service of real people. The question is, 'How can I be most useful?', not, 'How can I feel most useful?'

The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross.

If you want to see what judgment looks like, go to the cross. If you want to see what love looks like, go to the cross.

Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.

It's better to emphasize biblical theology, partly because there are fine Study Bibles already available that lean into systematic theology, and partly because biblical theology is particularly strong at helping readers see how the Bible hangs together in its own categories: that is, God in his infinite wisdom chose to give us his Word in the 66 canonical books, with all of their variations in theme, emphasis, vocabulary, literary form, and distinctive contributions across time.

Systematic theology will ask questions like "What are the attributes of God? What is sin? What does the cross achieve?" Biblical theology tends to ask questions such as "What is the theology of the prophecy of Isaiah? What do we learn from John's Gospel? How does the theme of the temple work itself out across the entire Bible?" Both approaches are legitimate; both are important. They are mutually complementary.

Study Bibles tend to circulate widely, so they play a disproportionate role in helping Christians and others understand holy Scripture. Further, many of our members have long used one or two other Study Bibles, and it is important that Christians not be tied too tightly to only one option, however good it may be.

A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen.

A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross.

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one, it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.

The important thing, Jesus is saying (in Matthew 5:33-37), is to tell the truth and keep one's pledges without insisting that a certain form of words must be used if it is to be binding. No oath is necessary for the truthful person... Their word is so reliable that nothing more than a statement is needed from them.

God's wrath is not an implacable, blind rage. However emotional it may be, it is an entirely reasonable and willed response to offenses against his holiness. But his love . . . wells up amidst his perfections and is not generated by the loveliness of the loved. Thus there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love being directed toward the same individual or people at the same time. God in his perfections must be wrathful against his rebel image-bearers, for they have offended him; God in his perfections must be loving toward his rebel image-bearers, for he is that kind of God

For the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. This vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns

We want to fan the flames of Christians for whom inerrancy and the authority of Scripture are not mere shibboleths, but part of her life beat, part of the beating heart of what makes them tick. They revere Scripture, not because Scripture becomes an idol, but because it discloses God who is especially come after us in salvation and redemption through the person of his son, his cross, his resurrection, the full sweep of the gospel.

When Christians speak of the authority of Scripture, because Christians believe that this word, even though it's mediated through many different human authors, nevertheless is God breathed and is revealed by God and is utterly reliable and all that it says, with all of its different literary genres, it's trustworthy and without mistake or distortion. It is trustworthy and therefore, because it is from God it has God's authority.

We are dealing with God's thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.

Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back.

Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. We do not drift into spiritual life; we do not drift into disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. That means we must self-consciousl y set aside time to do nothing but pray.

To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.

The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better.

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery... Will there also be faith?

It's not a matter of us standing outside it and ticking off the boxes: yes, the Bible is faithful here; yes, it's telling the truth there, and so on, but rather granted that it's God-given. It's the frame of reference that shows us how to live in, tells us how to think about everything.

We treat the Bible, not as if it's a magic book that has to be handled like a piece of abracadabra, make sure it's dusted, never put it on the floor, and things like that.

There is no sense in which Mohammed is viewed as a writer.

For example, the Bible does say this is a proposition, "There is no God." But of course the context of Psalm 14:1 enriches it a bit: "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God." So there are contextual constraints and when you finish putting in all the contextual constraints and sophisticated discussions of what inerrancy is and isn't.

It's not as if the New Testament writers came along and said, "The culmination of Old Testament books is more books, New Testament books." In some ways they thought instead of the culmination of Old Testament books being Christ himself, the word incarnate as the opening verses of Hebrews 1 put it. In the past God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son and the son is revelation.

The New Testament writers I think conceive of their inspired Scripture writings as flushing out, bringing to articulation, expounding and so on the climactic revelation in the son, but this in self-conscious fulfillment of the promises and covenants that were already made to God's chosen people in Old Testament times.

I can say that it's 10 miles from my home to Trinity, when in fact that's not quite right, it's off by about 10%, but nobody would say that I'm telling a lie or making a mistake when I rounded off because that's the way we speak and rounded off terms regularly.

So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things.

Not all Scripture is propositional, some of it is asking questions, some of it's rhetorical, but where Scripture is stating something, asserting something, making a truth claim, uttering a proposition that is claiming to be true, it is the truth.

The Bible is not interested in precisionism unless the context indicates that precision is particularly important.

In every generation there are voices that question the authority of Scripture. So in one sense this is merely part of the continuing stream. But there's a sense in which the questions that are raised against Scripture vary a wee bit from generation to generation.

The notion of the enduring authority focuses on the fact that some people think that notions like authority of Scripture's is passé, while others say that the present configuration of the doctrine of inerrancy is a late addition. And to both we want to say, No we're talking about the enduring authority of Scripture, grounded first and foremost in its relevatory status, something given by God and utterly reliable.

Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It's not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture.

At the end of the day, in brief summary: inerrancy is interested in the truthfulness of Scripture and it is a powerful way forcing people to think about that reliability that is God-given.

You get into theological education and you're busy marking papers and getting into administration in raising funds and doing all the things that are part of life, but here we were talking about important theological, historical, gospel related, biblically centered things hour after hour after hour.

What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence.

God has disclosed of himself in human words with such magnificent self accommodation to our limitations. Precisely so that we may be his holy people and reverence everything that he says, cherish it, value it, and thus live it out.

I suspect that relatively few people will sit down and read 1250 pages [ of The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures.] all the way through from cover to cover. There may be some, but not everybody. But there are many, many, many different Christian, theological, pastoral, specialisms that are covered by one section or another of the book and this will become, therefore, a resource volume for many people.

A wrong understanding is interested in precisionism. That is it tries to say that the Bible can't be telling the truth if it says that Jesus was such and such a distance from some place or other and in fact the distance is off by 15% or something like that. There are all kinds of grounded figures and so forth.

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery. Will there also be faith? Yes, if our attention is focused more on the cross, and on the God of the cross, than on the suffering itself.

God's love in John 3:16 is not amazing because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad.

The heart of all idolatry in the Bible is the de-godding of God.

Unchecked, the new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains.

To assume the gospel in one generation is to lose it in the next.

Good praying is more easily caught than taught.

To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.

One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most â??evangelisticâ? movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.