A quote from J. G. Millar about our need to know the Old Testament in order to know the gospel. He mentions Deuteronomy in particular, but what he says applies to the whole Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible):

Much of the theological framework needed to understand the significance of Jesus' coming, life and death was put in place by Moses in his writing, and perhaps above all in Deuteronomy. For it is here that the theology of blessing and curse which lies at the heart of Jesus' sin-bearing work is first articulated. It is here that the hopelessness of humanity trapped in sin, even when chosen by God, is exposed. It is here that the prospect of a divine intervention so radical that it changes people at the very core of their being first appears. (New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, pp. 164-165)

Lewis and Edwards on the Layers of Self-Admiration

Lewis and Edwards on the Layers of Self-Admiration: "

(Author: John Piper)

As a new Christian in 1930, C. S. Lewis was learning terrible things about his heart—the unfathomable layers of pride. It is astonishing how similar his description of his own heart was to the description Jonathan Edwards gave of our inscrutable strata of self-admiration.

Here is Lewis writing to his friend Arthur, amazingly within a year after his conversion:

During my afternoon 'meditations,'—which I at least attempt quite regularly now—I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sort of thoughts that do come.

And, will you believe it, one out of every three is the thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought 'what an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!' I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realize I am really thinking how frightfully clever I'm going to be and how he will admire me...

And then when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It is like fighting the hydra... There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depths of self-love and self-admiration. (quoted in The Narnian by Alan Jacobs, 133)

Then we go back 200 years to the1740s when Jonathan Edwards was struggling to sort out what was wheat and what was chaff in the emotions of the Great Awakening in New England. In one of his greatest books, Religious Affections, he gives the most penetrating descriptions of Christian humility I have ever seen. The part that foreshadows Lewis goes like this:

If on the proposal of the question [Are you humble?], you answer, 'No, it seems to me, none are so bad as I.' Don't let the matter pass off so; but examine again, whether or no you don't think yourself better than others on this very account, because you imagine you think so meanly of yourself. Haven't you a high opinion of this humility? And if you answer again, 'No; I have not a high opinion of my humility; it seems to me I am as proud as the devil'; yet examine again, whether self-conceit don't rise up under this cover; whether on this very account, that you think yourself as proud as the devil, you don't think yourself to be very humble. (quoted from the online works of Jonathan Edwards)

One of the reasons these two are such giants of influence is the depths of their own biblically informed self-knowledge. Layer after layer until they despaired of knowing themselves humble. Humility, it turns out isn't the kind of thing that can be spotted in oneself and prized.

Humility senses that humility is a gift beyond our reach. If humility is the product of reaching, then we will instinctively feel proud about our successful reach. Humility is the gift that receives all things as gift. It is the fruit not of our achievement but of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22). It is the fruit of the gospel—knowing and feeling that we are desperate sinners and that Christ is a great and undeserved Savior.

Humility is the one grace in all our graces that, if we gaze on it, becomes something else. It flourishes when the gaze is elsewhere—on the greatness of the grace of God in Christ.

"

Love my wife "as" Christ loved the church.

This quote comes from one of C. S. Lewis's last books, published in 1960, The Four Loves. In it we hear the wise fruit of a lifetime.

The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church—read on—and gave his life for her (Ephesians 5:25).

This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is—in her own mere nature—least lovable. For the church has no beauty but what the bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely.

The chrism [anointing, consecration] of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of the bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence.

As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labors to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears. (105-106)

Quotes on prayer

Richard Sibbes said, "God can pick sense out of a confused prayer."

Thomas Watson said, "The angel fetched Peter out of prison, but it was prayer that fetched the angel."

Abraham Lincoln said, "I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me seemed insufficient for the day."

This one's from John Bunyan, the imprisoned pastor who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress: “You can do more than pray, after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”javascript:void(0)

Robert Murray McCheyne said, "What a man is on his knees before God, that he is, and nothing more."

E. Stanley Jones said, "Prayer is surrender—surrender to the will of God and cooperation with that will. If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God."

Serving Two Masters

"No servant can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and money" (Luke 16:13).

In the original language, the word translated "money" was an Aramaic word, Mammon. This does not refer merely to money as a medium of exchange but also to a demonic spirit designed to promote a mind-set of ambition for riches, power and worldly gain. The word is capitalized in the original text because the people of Jesus' day thought of Mammon as a false god. Jesus was saying that those who spend their lives seeking worldly gain are idolaters. No one can serve two masters. No one can worship both the true God and a false god.

D. L. Moody about conviction of sin

“I would a great deal rather see a hundred men, thoroughly converted, truly born of God, than to see a thousand professed conversions where the Spirit of God has not convicted of sin. Don’t let us cry, ‘Peace,peace,’ when there is no peace. Don’t go to the man who is living in sin and tell him all he has to do is stand up and profess, without any hatred for sin. Let us ask God first to show every man the plague of his own heart that the Spirit may convict them of sin. Then will the work in our hands be real and deep and abide the fiery trials which will try every man’s labor.” -- D. L. Moody.