Only One Gospel

"We must be careful that we do not modify the gospel to suit various age groups. There is no such thing as a special gospel for the young, a special gospel for the middle-aged, and a special gospel for the aged. There is only one gospel, and we must always be careful not to tamper and tinker with the gospel as a result of recognizing these age distinctions. At the same time, there is a difference in applying this one and only gospel to the different age groups; but it is a difference which has reference only to method and procedure."

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Enlarge, inflame, and fill my heart

Give me the faith which can remove
And sink the mountain to a plain;
Give me the childlike praying love,
Which longs to build Thy house again;
Thy love, let it my heart overpower,
And all my simple soul devour.

I want an even strong desire,
I want a calmly fervent zeal,
To save poor souls out of the fire,
To snatch them from the verge of hell,
And turn them to a pardoning God,
And quench the brands in Jesus' blood.

I would the precious time redeem,
And longer live for this alone,
To spend and to be spent for them
Who have not yet my Saviour known;
Fully on these my mission prove,
And only breathe, to breathe Thy love.

My talents, gifts, and graces, Lord,
Into Thy blessed hands receive;
And let me live to preach Thy Word,
And let me to Thy glory live;
My every sacred moment spend
In publishing the sinner's Friend.

Enlarge, inflame, and fill my heart
With boundless charity divine,
So shall I all my strength exert,
And love them with a zeal like Thine,
And lead them to Thy open side,
The sheep for whom the Shepherd died.

Charles Wesley

Obedience

"If we are simply content to understand what [Paul] has said, but not to live by it, we are in a deeply disturbing spiritual condition. Obedience to the precepts of scripture can only herald the dawn of blessing. Disobedience or neglect will mean impoverishment. They will reveal that the very mercies of God that should spur me to action mean nothing to me at all. This will be the plainest possible indication that I am an ungrateful and unthankful person."

Stuart Olyott
from The Gospel as it Really Is

Passionate about the Gospel

"If there's anything in life we should be passionate about, it's the gospel. And I don't mean passionate only about sharing it with others; I mean passionate in thinking about the gospel, reflecting upon it, rejoicing in it, allowing it to color the way we look at the world and all of life."

C. J. Mahaney
from Living the Cross Centred Life

The Essence of Sin

"The essence of sin is to fail to glorify God. Man was made to glorify God - 'Man's chief end', the Shorter Catechism tells us, 'is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever'. And, you see, if we only defined sin as the failure to do that, we would see how everybody is a sinner, and we would see how the most respectable people can sometimes be the most terrible sinners. They have never been guilty of certain particular sins - of course not, but they do not glorify God; they glorify themselves. So many people say, 'I cannot feel that I am a sinner, I have never felt it'. That is because they are thinking in terms of sins; if only they saw that sin is really just a failure to glorify God with the whole of their being all the time, they would see that they are terrible sinners."

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
from Romans 1: The Gospel of God

Cultivating a Child-like Imagination

"If any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema." Galatians 1:9 (ASV)

"Oh how we need to meditate on the horror of rejecting the Gospel! We will not skim quickly over these verses onto something positive for only positive helps. That's not true. Satan has done an amazing trick in America and in the Western world with television and radio. He has used television and radio, especially the entertainment dimension, to create in our mind a mindset that is so trivial, banal, petty, earthly. We do not have the capacity to feel horror at the word 'anathema'. We don't have the capacity to believe it because we are so numbed by earthiness, by this world. We need, oh how we need, to guard ourselves against the barrage of eternity-denying entertainment and information. And I say that to you who are in the Church, not just to the worldly worldlings. The Church, it seems sometimes, is just as set on getting as much maximum entertainment, day in and day out, as everybody else. And it simply deadens the mind to ultimate reality that ought to stun us with its horror, like the word 'anathema'. We need to try to cultivate a child-like imagination...so that when a reality like 'Let him be accursed' hits us, we experience something like what a little child experiences the first time he hears a peal of thunder that cracks against the lime in his back yard and sends him running. "

John Piper
from When Not to Believe an Angel (Audio Message)

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