You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Assurance' category.
“This is a righteousness hidden in a mystery, which the world doth not know, yea, Christians themselves do not thoroughly understand it, and can hardly take hold of it in their temptations. There fore it must be diligently taught and continually practised. And whoso doth not understand or apprehend this righteousness in afflictions and terrors of conscience, must needs be overthrown. For there is no comfort of conscience so firm and so sure, as this passive righteousness.”
Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, in John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings (New York: Anchor, 1962), 101.
“When the poor chick sees the hawk come to seize it, it is likely to be surprised. If the hen is near, the chick runs to the hen who covers it and keeps it safe. So it should be with us, for Christ said of Jerusalem, ‘How often would I have gathered thee as a hen gathereth her chicklings?’ There is a company of hawks abroad in the world, and we are poor, shiftless creatures. Now, how happy are we, then, if we can run under the shadow of God’s wings? There is a kind of shadow in the presence of God in the enjoyment of the creature; but the shadow of God that we have in His worship is as the shadow of His wing. There is the shadow of a tree, and that may help from some kind of trouble, but there is another manner of shadow under the shadow of the wing of the hen, because that nourishes the chick. Then men of the world have the shadow of the tree, as it were, God’s general providence, which is over all creatures; but the saints of God who draw nigh to God have the shadow of God’s wing, like the shadow of the hen’s wing to the chick, that comforts it and safeguards it. Let us, by the duties of worship, thus draw nigh to God and keep nigh unto Him.”
Jeremiah Burroughs, “Gospel Worship (The Right Manner of Sanctifying the Name of God in General), edited by Don Kistler (Orlando: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990), 45-6; originally published in 1648.
“When I was a young man, I heard D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones comment that he would not go across the street to hear himself preach. Now that I am close to the age he was when I heard him, I am beginning to understand. It is rare for me to finish a sermon without feeling somewhere between slightly discouraged and moderately depressed that I have not preached with more unction, that I have not articulated these glorious truths more powerfully and with greater insight, and so forth. But I cannot allow that to drive me to despair; rather, it must drive me to a greater grasp of the simple and profound truth that we preach and visit and serve under the gospel of grace, and God accepts us because of his Son. I must learn to accept myself not because of my putative successes but because of the merits of God’s Son. The ministry is so open-ended that one never feels that all possible work has been done, or done as well as one might like. There are always more people to visit, more studying to be done, more preparations to do. What Christians must do, what Christian leaders must do, is constantly remember that we serve our God and Maker and Redeemer under the gospel of grace. Dad’s diaries show he understood this truth in theory, and sometimes exulted in it (as when he was reading from Machen’s What is Faith?), but quite frankly, his sense of failure sometimes blinded him to the glory of gospel freedom.”
D. A. Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 92-3.
“What I needed was flying. . . . I needed to fly so much that my subconscious mind would become so reconditioned to the air that it would accept it as its natural element.”
Suffering the loss of a loved one, suffering from an inability to sleep, pilot Gordon Taylor believes that flying, his only joy, will become his only life; Gordon Taylor, The Sky Beyond (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 91.
“Somewhat she [Beatrice] smiled; and then, ‘If the opinion
Of mortals be erroneous,’ she said,
‘Where’er the key of sense doth not unlock,
Certes, the shafts of wonder should not pierce thee
Now, forasmuch as, following the senses,
Thou seest that the reason has short wings.
But tell me what thou think’st of it thyself.’”
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, “Paradiso,” Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Canto II, 52-58.
“I read Grace Abounding in Everyman, having (your remember) read Mr Badman in the same volume on the way over. Grace Abounding is incomparably the better of the two. Some of the sentences in it reach right down. ‘But the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness’ – ‘I thought I could have spoken of his love and his mercy even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me’ – ‘I could not find that with all my soul I did desire deliverance.’ Of course a great part of it paints the horrors of religion and sometimes almost of insanity. What do you make of the curious temptation that assailed him just after he had been converted and felt himself united to Christ; when a voice kept saying ‘Sell Him, sell Him’: sometimes for hours at a stretch, until in mere weariness Bunyan blurted out ‘Let Him go if he will’ – which afterwards led him into despair, believing he had committed the unpardonable sin?
I suppose this is the same mental disease of which you and I have felt a trace in the impulse to throw ones new book in the fire – some strange twist that impels you to do a thing because it is precisely the one thing of all others that you don’t want to do.
I should like to know, too, in general, what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more, that element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly. There must be something in it: only what.
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 850; letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 22 December, 1929, on his reading of John Bunyan.
“They then addressed themselves to the water, and, entering, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said, ‘I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head all the waves go over me. Selah. . . . Ah! my friend, ‘the sorrows of death have compassed me about;’ I shall not see the land that flows with milk and honey.”
Christian’s cry, as he crosses the “River,” aka, ‘The River of Death;’ John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, chapter 19.
“Look hard at Jesus, especially as he goes to his death, and you will discover more about God than you could ever have guessed from studying the infinite shining heavens or the moral law within your own conscience.”
N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (Harper One: New York, 2006), 138.
