A Quote by R. C. Sproul
We are able to persevere only because God works within us, within our free wills. And because God is at work in us, we are certain to persevere. The decrees of God concerning election are immutable. They do not change, because He does not change. All whom He justifies He glorifies. None of the elect has ever been lost.
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There are two gods. The god our teachers teach us about, and the God who teaches us. The god about whom people usually talk, and the God who talks to us. The god we learn to fear, and the God who speaks to us of mercy. The god who is somewhere up on high, and the God who is here in our daily lives. The god who demands punishment, and the God who forgives us our trespasses. The god who threatens us with the torments of Hell, and the God who shows us the true path.
There are two gods. A god who casts us off because of our sins, and a God who calls to us with His love.
None of us like the concept of law because none of us like the restraints it puts on us. But when we understand that God has given us his law to aid us in guarding our souls, we see that the law is for our fulfillment, not for our limitation. The law reminds us that some things, some experiences, some relationships are sacred. When everything has been profaned, it is not just my freedom that has been lost- the loss is everyone's. God gave us the law to remind us of the sacredness of life, and our created legal systems only serve to remind us of the profane judgments we make.
The needed change within us is God's work, not ours. The demand is for an inside job, and only God can work from the inside. We cannot attain or earn this righteousness of the kingdom of God: it is a grace that is given.
Why do we fail? Is it because we are unlucky? Is it because we have not worked very hard? I s it because we have not invoked God's Compassion and Blessings? Is it because God has accepted this failure as an experience He wanted to have in our life? Is it because God has granted this failure to us? Is it because God has willed that we should lose? No! not it is for a different reason that we experience failure. It is for the strengthening of our consciousness that, at times, God grants us defeat.
Good ideas are not good enough. They need to be God ideas. Just because someone else’s methods work does not mean they will work for us. God plants a unique set of gifts within each of us as leaders, enabling us to do a particular work for Him in a particular way. If we deny those, opting for something else that appeals to us, we forsake the means by which God wants to give us success (1Timothy 4:14).
Within each of us exists the image of God, however disfigured and corrupted by sin it may presently be. God is able to recover this image through grace as we are conformed to Christ. Just as the figure of David lay hidden within the marble, discernible only to the eye of its creator, so the image of God (however tarnished by sin) lies within us, see and known by God Himself. Yet God loves us while we are still sinners. He doesn't have to wait until we stop sinning. Acceptance of His love is a major step along the road that leads to our liberation from the tyranny of sin.
There is nothing you need to do to make yourself more acceptable to God. You don't have to work harder, nor do you need to change the kind of work you do. You don't have to give more money to charitable organizations. The reality is, God doesn't want you to give anyone anything if you only do it to impress God! God does not love you or find you acceptable because of anything that you do. God loves you and accepts you because you are a part of God.
God does sometimes change our trying circumstances. But more often, He doesn't - because He wants to change us.
Sin must be within God's eternal decrees in some sense in which He is not the author of it . . . We must conclude then that within the decrees of God, there are decrees of permission of those things of which God Himself is not the author
Religion is about God's truth, but none of us can grasp that truth absolutely, because of our own imperfections and limitations. We are only children of God, not God. Therefore, we must not attempt to fit God into little boxes, claiming that He supports this or that political position. This is not only bad theology; it marginalizes God.
It is clear that he does not pray, who, far from uplifting himself to God, requires that God shall lower Himself to him, and who resorts to prayer not to stir the man in us to will what God wills, but only to persuade God to will what the man in us wills.
We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.
For we are so preciously loved by God that we cannot even comprehend it. No created being can ever know how much and how sweetly and tenderly God loves them. It is only with the help of his grace that we are able to persevere in spiritual contemplation with endless wonder at his high, surpassing, immeasurable love which our Lord in his goodness has for us.
Reformed theology does NOT teach that God brings the ELECT kicking and screaming, against their will, into His kingdom. It teaches that God so-works in the hearts of the Elect as to make them willing and pleased to come to Christ. They come to Christ because they want to. They want to because God has created in their hearts a desire for Christ.
I believe certain doctrines because God says they are true; and the only authority I have for their truth is the Word of God. I receive such and such doctrines, not because I can prove them to be compatible with reason, not because my judgment accepts them, but because God says they are true. Now this is one of the best services we can render to God,-to submit ourselves to him in our belief of what he has revealed, and ask him to fix his truths in our hearts, and make us obey them.
The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is. Cheek-turning is not advocated as what works (it usually does not), but advocated because this is the way God is - God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. This is not a stratagem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not because we feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is doing in the world through Christ.
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