Results 41 - 60 of 11018
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Results from: Answered Bible Questions, Answers, Unanswered Bible Questions, Notes Author: DocTrinsograce Ordered by Date |
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Results | Verse | Author | ID# | |||
41 | God's Protection Against a Fall | Matt 7:27 | DocTrinsograce | 243967 | ||
"We believe that those Holy Scriptures fully contain the will of God, and whatsoever man ought to believe unto salvation is sufficiently taught therein. For since the whole manner of worship which God requires of us is written in them at large, it is unlawful for any one, though an apostle, to teach otherwise than we are now taught in the Holy Scriptures: nay, though it were an angel from heaven, as the apostle Paul says. For since it is forbidden to add unto or take away anything from the Word of God, it does thereby evidently appear that the doctrine thereof is most perfect and complete in all respects. Neither may we consider any writings of men, however holy these men may have been, of equal value with those divine Scriptures, nor ought we to consider custom, or the great multitude, or antiquity, or succession of times and persons, or councils or decrees or statutes, as of equal value with the truth of God, since the truth is above all; for all men or of themselves liars, and more van than vanity itself. Therefore we reject with all our hearts whatever does not agree with this infallible rule, as the apostles have taught us saying, Test the spirits, whether they are of God. Likewise: any one comes to you and brings not this teaching, receive him not into your house. --Belgic Confession article VII |
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42 | Value of the Roots of Halakha | Acts 17:17 | DocTrinsograce | 243965 | ||
"We often read the Bible, hear the news, listen to a sermon, or talk to friends, yet we don’t get much out of it. One central reason for this may be our lack of knowledge and intellectual growth. The more you know, the more you see and hear because your mind brings more to the task of 'seeing as' or 'seeing that.' In fact, the more you know about extra-biblical matters, the more you will see in the Bible. Why? Because you will see distinctions in the Bible or connections between Scripture and an issue in another area of life that would not be possible without the concepts and categories placed in the mind's structure by gaining the relevant knowledge in those extra-biblical areas of thought. Thus, general intellectual development can enrich life and contribute to Bible study and spiritual formation. "There is a closely related reason why intellectual development can enhance spiritual development: The mind forms habits and falls into ruts. One day at a chapel meeting, a missions professor showed a film clip of a foreign culture unfamiliar to most of us. He asked us to write down everything we noticed. He then showed the clip a second time and asked us to repeat the exercise. Everyone in the chapel meeting compared his or her first and second lists and, in every case, they were virtually identical!. The professor's lesson: our minds get into ruts in which we tend to look for things we have already seen in order to validate our earlier perceptions. We seldom look at things from entirely fresh perspectives! "If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we get into ruts in our thinking and develop habits of thought that can grow stale after a while. This is where renewing the mind comes in. A life of study can give us a constant source of new categories and beliefs that will lead to fresh insights and stave off intellectual boredom. Many people become bored with the Bible precisely because their overall intellectual growth is stagnant. They cannot get new insights from Scripture because they bring the same old categories to Bible study and look to validate their old habits of thought." --J. P. Moreland (1997) from his book "Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul" |
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43 | Watch Yourself... Do Not Forget the Lord | Deut 6:12 | DocTrinsograce | 243964 | ||
"It is easy for us as modern Christians to point the finger at the Israelites and take them to task for the fact that they forgot God. The complaining we see in the wilderness, the cycle of apostasy, judgment, and restoration that we see in Judges, the good king/bad king alternations that we see in 1–2 Kings -- these all emphasize the incessant inability of the Israelites to heed Moses’ admonition to 'take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery' (Deut. 6:12). We get tired when we read through Jeremiah and chapter after chapter is devoted to enumerating the sins of Israel and telling of Israel's coming judgment. We feel that we are superior to Israel, more spiritual, less likely to forget God. "But we, too, get distracted by the demands of our days, by the busyness of our times. We forget that as Moses warned that declining from the commandments of God displays a forgetting of God, the same applies to us. We tend to think that ignoring, or rather, not fully living up to one commandment of God is a small thing. But the result is not simply disobedience. It is the beginning of idolatry, of making a god in our own image, a god we can easily obey. But did Jesus not say, 'If you love me, you will keep my commandments' (John 14:15)? Yet, we find His commandments so easy to ignore. 'Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you' (Eph. 4:32), Paul says, but we want to hold on to offenses and resentments. It feels good to bear a grudge. But that is not the way Christ teaches. To bear a grudge, to envy the gifts and graces of others, to covet the possessions of others -- these are steps on the way to forgetting God." --Dr. Benjamin Shaw |
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44 | Rejoice at the Redeemer's Birth | Luke 1:14 | DocTrinsograce | 243960 | ||
"It was love, mere love; it was free love that brought the Lord Jesus Christ into our world. What, shall we not remember the birth of Jesus? Shall we yearly celebrate the birth of our temporal king [of England], and shall that of the King of kings be quite forgotten? Shall that only, which ought to be had chiefly in remembrance, be quite forgotten? God forbid! "No, my brethren, let us celebrate and keep this festival of our church with joy in our hearts: let the birth of a redeemer, which redeemed us from sin, from wrath, from death, from hell, be always remembered; may this Savior’s; love never be forgotten! But may we sing forth all his love and glory as long as life shall last here, and through an endless eternity in the world above! May we chant forth the wonders of redeeming love and the riches of free grace, amidst angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim, without intermission, forever and ever!" --George Whitefield (1714-1770) |
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45 | Grace of our God Alone | 2 Thess 1:12 | DocTrinsograce | 243959 | ||
"Grace stands in direct opposition to any supposed worthiness on our part. To say it another way: Grace and works are mutually exclusive. As Paul said in Romans 11:6, 'And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.' Our relationship with God is based on either works or grace. There is never a works-plus-grace relationship with Him." --Jerry Bridges from his book "Transforming Grace" |
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46 | The Sole Authority | Ps 119:133 | DocTrinsograce | 243958 | ||
"Jesus prayed to the Father, 'Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth' (John 17:17). Scripture is God's Word written, and apart from it we cannot have a saving knowledge of God or grow in our relationship with Him. The Apostle Paul says God gave us the Scriptures to profit us through teaching, reproving, correcting, and training in righteousness so 'that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work' (2 Tim. 3:16–17). To grow in maturity, a Christian must grow in his understanding of and submission to Scripture. "A casual acquaintance with the Bible will not suffice, as Jesus makes clear in the conclusion of His Sermon on the Mount when He contrasts a house built on a rock that withstands the storms with one built on sand that is destroyed by them. The latter represents the person who merely hears the Word of Christ without submissively complying with it. His life lacks stability. The former is like the wise man who not only hears the teachings of Jesus but 'does them.' His life will be characterized by a maturity that stands firm through the trials of life. "God has designed His Word to shape us through reading and hearing (Romans 10:17; Revelation 1:3), through meditation and memorization (Joshua 1:8; Psalms 1:1-3; 119:11), and especially through faithful preaching (2 Timothy 4:1-5)." |
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47 | God Gains the Victory | Ps 98:1 | DocTrinsograce | 243957 | ||
"There are other ways in which God works sanctification in us in such a way that we are victorious over sin. "To confess our sins before God brings forgiveness. That too is victory. When, at Calvary, we confess our sins and seek forgiveness through the blood of Christ, these sins are forgiven, and we know that we are righteous and sinless before the eyes of our Father in heaven. Sin cannot rob us of His love and care. Sin confessed cannot keep us from heaven. Sin washed away in the blood of Christ gives us victory over Satan and his hosts, the world, and our own remaining sin. "Thus the victory of the child of God is found in a good conscience. Our conscience condemns us because it shows us our sins. But Scripture speaks of consciences washed in the blood of Christ (Heb.9:14). With freedom from an accusing conscience, we walk in the joy and hope of our salvation. Free from sin in God’s eyes, we are victorious. ... "The victory of the Christian is evident too in the fact that, although he falls in his path, he never gives up. He may yield to that temptation again and again, and commit the same sin repeatedly. The temptation to give up and fight no longer is strong. But he never does. Fallen, he rises again. Weary in the battle, he presses forward. Wounded and bleeding, he resolves to pursue his calling with renewed strength. He cannot be defeated, no matter how fierce the battle. He is more than a conqueror!" --Professor Herman Hanko (2016) from his book "The Victorious Christian" |
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48 | Christ Calls for Repentance | Rev 2:22 | DocTrinsograce | 243956 | ||
"Repentance is looked upon as a tedious thing, requiring great effort; but men are content with their dregs and do not care to stir. They would rather go sleeping to hell than weeping to heaven. 'A slothful man hides his hand in his vest' (Prov. 19.24); he will not strike his breast. Many would rather lose heaven than ply the oar and row on the waters of repentance. We cannot have the world citra pulverem (without labor and diligence); would we not rather have what is more excellent? Sloth is the cancer of the soul: 'Slothfulness tosses into a deep sleep' (Prov. 19.15). It was a witty fiction of the poets that when Mercury put Argus to sleep and closed his eyes with an enchanted flute, he then killed him. It is no fiction that when Satan has lulled men to sleep in sloth by his witcheries, he then destroys them. Some report that while the crocodile sleeps with its mouth open, the Indian rat gets into its belly and eats up its entrails. So too while men sleep in false security, they are devoured." --Thomas Watson (1620-1686) |
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49 | Thanksgiving Unto our Lord 2016 | Ps 50:23 | DocTrinsograce | 243955 | ||
The past few days, and the current holiday, have caused me to think back upon those things for which I am grateful to our God in His eternal providence. I am grateful for family, and God's work in their lives. I am grateful for a Proverbs 31 wife, who consistently manifests all of the fruit of the Spirit. I am grateful for a church who holds firmly to the truth, all that God has revealed (Deuteronomy 29:29). I am grateful that they do not try to revise history so as to cause themselves and the Reformers to look more fully Scriptural and more righteous than they were. I am grateful to a Saviour who affirmed the importance of truth and only truth. I am grateful that I have been received amidst a group of scholars who will not bend history to fit their doctrine, but rather recognize that our doctrine doesn't need such bolstering. I am grateful for the Reformers, who sought the truth of God even though it often resulted in the loss of their lives. I am grateful for the technology that allows us to verify church history. Above all else, I am grateful for God's wondrous work of salvation, that -- through absolutely no merit of my own -- saved a wretch like me. Have a blessed and happy Thanksgiving to one and all. The First Thanksgiving Proclamation (06/20/1675): "The Holy God having by a long and Continual Series of his Afflictive dispensations in and by the present War with the Heathen Natives of this land, written and brought to pass bitter things against his own Covenant people in this wilderness, yet so that we evidently discern that in the midst of his judgments he hath remembered mercy, having remembered his Footstool in the day of his sore displeasure against us for our sins, with many singular Intimations of his Fatherly Compassion, and regard; reserving many of our Towns from Desolation Threatened, and attempted by the Enemy, and giving us especially of late with many of our Confederates many signal Advantages against them, without such Disadvantage to ourselves as formerly we have been sensible of, if it be the Lord’s mercy that we are not consumed, It certainly bespeaks our positive Thankfulness, when our Enemies are in any measure disappointed or destroyed; and fearing the Lord should take notice under so many Intimations of his returning mercy, we should be found an Insensible people, as not standing before Him with thanksgiving, as well as lading him with our Complaints in the time of pressing Afflictions.†|
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50 | Attestation of Unity in the Truth | 3 John 1:3 | DocTrinsograce | 243953 | ||
"Unity without verity is no better than conspiracy." --John Trapp (1601-1669) |
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51 | Judgment Against False Doctrine | Zech 5:4 | DocTrinsograce | 243949 | ||
"And no fact in Church history is more clearly proved than this -- that false doctrine has never ceased to be the plague of Christendom for the last eighteen centuries [now twenty-one centuries]. Looking forward with the eye of a prophet. Saint Paul might well say 'I fear: I fear not merely the corruption of your morals, but of your minds.' The plain truth is that false doctrine has been the chosen engine which Satan has employed in every age to stop the progress of the Gospel of Christ. Finding himself unable to prevent the Fountain of Life being opened, he has laboured incessantly to poison the streams which flow from it. If he could not destroy it, he has too often neutralized its usefulness by addition, subtraction, or substitution. In a word he has 'corrupted men's minds.'" --J. C. Ryle from his "Warnings to the Church" |
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52 | Wolves Among the Sheep | Ezek 22:27 | DocTrinsograce | 243948 | ||
"Many things combine to make the present inroad of false doctrine peculiarly dangerous. There is an undeniable zeal in some of the teachers of error: their 'earnestness' (to use an unhappy cant phrase) makes many think they must be right. There is a general tendency to free thought and free inquiry in these latter days: many like to prove their independence of judgment, by believing novelties. There is a wide-spread desire to appear charitable and liberal-minded: many seem half ashamed of saying that anybody can be in the wrong. There is a quantity of half-truth taught by the modern false teachers: they are incessantly using Scriptural terms and phrases in an unscriptural sense. There is a morbid craving in the public mind for a more sensuous, ceremonial, sensational, showy worship: men are impatient of inward, invisible heartwork. There is a silly readiness in every direction to believe everybody who talks cleverly, lovingly, and earnestly, and a determination to forget that Satan is often 'transformed into an angel of light.' (2 Corinthians 2:14) There is a wide-spread 'gullibility' among professing Christians: every heretic who tells his story plausibly is sure to be believed, and everybody who doubts him is called a persecutor and a narrow-minded man. All these things are peculiar symptoms of our times. I defy any observing man to deny them. They tend to make the assaults of false doctrine in our day peculiarly dangerous. They make it more than ever needful to cry aloud, 'Be not carried about.'" --J. C. Ryle, from his "Warnings to the Churches" |
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53 | What Liberty is This? | Prov 10:20 | DocTrinsograce | 243946 | ||
"This doctrine of total inability which declares that men are dead in sin does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be, nor that anyone is entirely destitute of virtue, nor that human nature is equal in itself, nor that man’s spirit in inactive, and much less does it mean that the body is dead. What is does mean is that since the fall, man rests under the curse of sin, that he is actuated by wrong principles, and that he is wholly unable to love God, or to do anything meriting salvation. His corruption is extensive, but not necessarily intensive. It is in this sense that man, since the fall, is utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, wholly inclined to all evil. He possesses a fixed bias of the will against God, and instinctively and willingly and turns to evil. He is an alien by birth, and a sinner by choice. The inability under which he labors is not an inability to exercise volition, but an inability to be willing to exercise holy volitions. And it is this phase of it which led Luther to declare that ‘free will’ is an empty term, whose reality is lost; and a lost liberty, according to my grammar, is no liberty at all." --Loraine Boettner |
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54 | Our Proper and Only Happiness | Eccl 3:13 | DocTrinsograce | 243944 | ||
"God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of any, or all earthly friends. These are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean." --Jonathan Edwards (1732) |
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55 | Liberalism, Despite Different Names | Jer 32:33 | DocTrinsograce | 243940 | ||
"At the outset, we are met with an objection. 'Teachings,' it is said, 'are unimportant; the exposition of the teachings of liberalism and the teachings of Christianity, therefore, can arouse no interest at the present day; creeds are merely the changing expression of a unitary Christian experience, and provided only they express that experience they are all equally good. The teachings of liberalism, therefore, might be as far removed as possible from the teachings of historic Christianity, and yet the two might be at bottom the same.' "Such is the way in which expression is often given to the modern hostility to ‘doctrine.’ But is it really doctrine as such that is objected to, and not rather one particular doctrine in the interests of another? Undoubtedly, in many forms of liberalism it is the latter alternative which fits the case. There are doctrines of modern liberalism, just as tenaciously and intolerantly upheld as any doctrines that find a place in the historic creeds. Such for example are the liberal doctrines of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. These doctrines are ... contrary to the doctrines of the Christian religion. But doctrines they are all the same, and as such they require intellectual defense. In seeming to object to all theology, the liberal preacher is often merely objecting to one system of theology in the interests of another. And the desired immunity from theological controversy has not yet been attained." --J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) |
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56 | The Word Gifted to the People of God | 2 Pet 1:17 | DocTrinsograce | 243936 | ||
Hi, Pastor... You have to interpret Ed based on context: in this case by 600 years, i.e., the Dutch Remonstrants (1610). He would not have necessarily know of the Pelagian Heresy, otherwise he would have written 1600 years; or the Montanist Heresy, otherwise he would have written 1800 years. You have to subtract a couple of centuries to understand the historic reference. He cherishes the teaching of these people, with some contemporary adjustment; but it would be a logical fallacy for me to denigrate his logic based on arithmetic/historic weaknesses; which thing I will not do. In Him, Doc |
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57 | The Word Gifted to the People of God | 2 Pet 1:17 | DocTrinsograce | 243935 | ||
Job 32:1 applies... so does Proverbs 1:5; 12:15 | ||||||
58 | Both Fell in a Hole | Luke 6:39 | DocTrinsograce | 243933 | ||
"If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself." --Augustine of Hippo (354 AD - 430 AD) | ||||||
59 | Eyes on Self Alone | Job 32:1 | DocTrinsograce | 243930 | ||
"The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, he don't obey no orders unless they is his own." --Rudyard Kipling (1892), from his poem Tommy |
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60 | The Word Gifted to the People of God | 2 Pet 1:17 | DocTrinsograce | 243929 | ||
Ah... Clearly you have not read a thing that I have posted. So much complaining without hearing a word (Proverbs 18:13). Thus, I am answering someone who is simply parroting out of their bigotry. I fear that that makes me the greater fool. I will cease with impunity. | ||||||
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