Obedience to Scripture

The church’s great danger: Wrong thoughts about God

Tony Reinke A.W. Tozer, Doctrine, God, Great Quotes, Idolatry, Idols, Liberal Theology, Obedience to Scripture, Thoughts of God

“Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and the history of the Church confirms it. So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards decline along with it. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God.

Before the Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is, and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.”

– A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (HarperCollins: San Francisco), 1961, p. 4.

John Owen: The excellency of genuine Christian faith

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, Faith, Great Quotes, Humility, John Owen, Obedience to Scripture, Unbelief

“Herein consists the excellency of faith above all other powers and acts of the soul – that it receives, assents unto, and rests in things in their own nature absolutely incomprehensible [Trinity, incarnation, Cross, etc.] … The more sublime and glorious – the more inaccessible unto sense and reason – the things are which we believe; the more are we changed into the image of God, in the exercise of faith upon them … faith which is truly divine, is never more in its proper exercise – doth never more elevate the soul into conformity unto God – than when it acts in the contemplation and admiration of the most incomprehensible mysteries which are proposed unto it by divine revelation.”

– John Owen, The Glory of Christ, Works 1:50

Church discipline

Tony Reinke Banner of Truth, Biblically Faithful, Church discipline, Great Quotes, Hard decisions, M'Cheyne, Obedience to Scripture, Pastoral Failure, Pastoral Ministry, Pupit Seriousness, Shepherding, Sin

“When I first entered upon the work of the ministry among you, I was exceedingly ignorant of the vast importance of church discipline. I thought that my great and almost only work was to pray and preach. I saw your souls to be so precious, and the time so short, that I devoted all my time, and care, and strength, to labor in word and doctrine. When cases of discipline were brought before me and the elders, I regarded them with something like abhorrence. It was a duty I shrank from; and I may truly say it nearly drove me from the work of the ministry among you altogether. But it pleased God, who teaches His servants in another way than man teaches, to bless some of the cases of discipline to the manifest and undeniable conversion of the souls of those under our care; and from that hour a new light broke in upon my mind, and I saw that if preaching be an ordinance of Christ, so is church discipline. I now feel very deeply persuaded that both are of God – that two keys are committed to us by Christ: the one the key of doctrine, by means of which we unlock the treasures of the Bible; the other the key of discipline, by which we open or shut the way to the sealing ordinances of the faith. Both are Christ’s gift, and neither is to be resigned without sin.”

– Robert Murray M’Cheyne in Andrew Bonar, Memoir & Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne (Banner of Truth: 1844/2004), p. 73.

See Matthew 18:15-20 (clearly defined steps of church discipline), 1 Cor. 5:4-5 with 5:9-13; 2 Cor. 7:8-12 (the fruit of godly confrontation); 1 Tim. 1:18-20; Tit. 3:9-11 (notice the difference between church discipline and dealing with the divisive man); Rev. 2:1-7 (notice how a disciplining and discerning church can still lack in passionate love for Christ).