A Peculiar Flabbiness

For some extraordinary reason a peculiar flabbiness—intellectual and moral—seems to have entered into many people, Evangelicals included. Many, alas, seem to object in these days to negative teaching. ‘Let us have positive teaching’, they say. ‘You need not criticize other views.’ But our Lord definitely did criticize the teaching of the Pharisees and scribes. He exposed and denounced it frequently. And it is essential, of course, that we should do the same.

-Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Sermon on the Mount

Flattening Pulpits

Do not talk to me of mild and gentle men, of soft manners and squeamish words, we want the fiery Knox, and even though his vehemence should ‘ding our pulpits into blads,’ it were well if he did but rouse our hearts to action.

-C.H. Spurgeon, from Iain Murray’s Forgotten Spurgeon

A Promiscuous Verb

Whatever disagreements existed among believing Christians in the era after the Second World War, evangelicals at that time were clearly doctrinal vertebrates of some description. But in recent decades, we have added more than a little money to the movement, some academic respectability, a lust for influence, and the result is the widespread existence of evangelicals who think that dialogue is a verb, and a promiscuous one at that.

-Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk

I’ll Take the Ditchdigger

Take any county throughout England, you will find poor men hedging and ditching that have a better knowledge of divinity than one half of those who come from our academies and colleges, for the reason simply and entirely that these men have first learned in their youth the system of which election is a centre, and have afterwards found their own experience exactly square with it.

-C.H. Spurgeon, quoted in Iain Murray’s, The Forgotten Spurgeon

My, Such Refined Sheepdogs!

If there were only one prayer which I might pray before I died, it should be this: ‘Lord, send thy Church men filled with the Holy Ghost and with fire.’ Give to any denomination such men, and its progress must be mighty: keep back such men, send them college gentlemen, of great refinement and profound learning, but of little fire and grace, dumb dogs which cannot bark, and straightway that denomination must decline.

-C.H. Spurgeon, quoted by Iain Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon

Apostolic Succession

Ask me ‘Where is the Church?’ and I can find her at any and every period from the day when first in the upper room the Holy Ghost came down even until now. In one unbroken line our apostolic succession runs; not through the Church of Rome; not from the superstitious hands of priest-made popes, or king-created bishops (what a varnished lie is the apostolic succession of those who boast so proudly of it!), but through the blood of good men and true, who never forsook the testimony of Jesus; through the loins of true pastors, laborious evangelists, faithful martyrs, and honourable men of God, we trace our pedigree up to the fishermen of Galilee and glory that we perpetuate by God’s grace that true and faithful Church of the living God, in whom Christ did abide and will abide until the world’s crash.

-C.H. Spurgeon, as quoted in The Forgotten Spurgeon, by Iain Murray

Irrepressible Grace

Grace can no more be concealed than fire. Like new wine it will have vent. Grace does not lie in the heart as a stone in the earth, but as a seed in the earth. It will spring up into good works.

-Thomas Watson, The Beatitudes