Friday, July 31, 2015
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
The Working Of God's Word
"In
short, I will preach it, teach it, write it, but I will constrain no
man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself
as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never
with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word; otherwise I
did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my
friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that
no prince or emperor ever inflicted such loses upon it. I did nothing;
the Word did everything." Martin Luther
Our confidence must be in the Word of God not our ability, or our programs, or our music, or the latest bestseller, or our advertising, only the Word of God can accomplish God's purposes and change lives.
Our confidence must be in the Word of God not our ability, or our programs, or our music, or the latest bestseller, or our advertising, only the Word of God can accomplish God's purposes and change lives.
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Friday, July 24, 2015
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Monday, July 20, 2015
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
The Only Way People Can Be Saved
‘For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it
is the gift of God.’ Let us look first at the positive statement. Here
is his assertion positively, that we are Christians entirely and solely
as the result of the grace of God. Let us remind ourselves once more
that ‘grace’ means unmerited, undeserved favor. It is an action which
arises entirely from the gracious character of God. So the fundamental
proposition is that salvation is something that comes to
us entirely from God’s side. What is still more important is this, that
it not only comes from God’s side, it comes to us in spite of
ourselves—‘unmerited’ favor. In other words, it is not God’s response to
anything in us. Now there are many people who seem to think that it
is—that salvation is God’s response to something in us. But the word
‘grace’ excludes that. It is in spite of us. The apostle, as we have
seen, has already been very much concerned to say this. You notice the
interesting way in which he, as it were, slipped it in in the fifth
verse. He interrupted himself, broke the symmetry of his statement, and
was guilty of a serious blemish from the standpoint of literary style.
But he was not interested in that. Listen to him: ‘Even when we were
dead in sins, he hath quickened, us together with Christ’, and then,
instead of going on to the next step—in parenthesis ‘(by grace ye are
saved)’. Here, he puts it a little more explicitly. Salvation is not in
any sense God’s response to anything in us. It is not something that we
in any sense deserve or merit. The whole essence of the teaching at this
point, and everywhere in all the New Testament, is that we have no sort
or kind of right whatsoever to salvation, that the whole glory of
salvation is, that though we deserved nothing but punishment and hell
and banishment out of the sight of God to all eternity, yet God, of His
own love and grace and wondrous mercy, has granted us this salvation.
Now that is the entire meaning of this term ‘grace’. BY MARTYN
LLOYD-JONES
Friday, July 10, 2015
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Saturday, July 4, 2015
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