Lions Coach Jim Caldwell Quotes Theologian Charles Hodge

Lions coach Jim Caldwell in today's interview quotes theologian Charles Hodge principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878 "There's a guy named Charles Hodge who is actually a great theologian, but he made this statement- ‘You have to be able to exalt men without inflating them' and the other part of it is, ‘and humble men without debasing them.' So, that's kind of a balancing act for us. We have to make certain that we make them feel good about what they're doing, but not to the point where they feel overconfident. We have to make certain, obviously, that we tell them the truth about things they've done wrong, but we don't have to dog-cuss them and tear them down. So, it's a delicate balancing act trying to kind of keep a team on even keel all across the board, never too high never too low." 

How nice to have a well read Lions coach who even knows who Charles Hodge is. I'm sure most of the reporters didn't have a clue.

Gossip vs. Flattery

Gossip involves saying behind a person’s back what you would never say to his or her face.
Flattery means saying to a person’s face what you would never say behind his or her back.

—R. Kent Hughes, Disciplines of a Godly Man, 10th anniversary ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), p. 139.

Justin Taylor

Mark Steyn on Thanksgiving

Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

Mark Steyn:

The Third Great Work Of God

After the creation and the incarnation, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the third great work of God. . . .

At the creation the morning stars sang, and all the children of God shouted with joy. At the birth of Christ a multitude of heavenly hosts raised a song of jubilation to God's good pleasure. On the birthday of the church, the church itself acclaims in many languages the great works of God.

--Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:500, 503
Dane Ortlund

Christ’s death is the Christian’s life

“Christ’s death is the Christian’s life. Christ’s cross is the Christian’s title to heaven. Christ ‘lifted up’ and put to shame on Calvary is the ladder by which Christians ‘enter into the holiest,’ and are at length landed in glory.
It is true that we are sinners–but Christ has suffered for us. It is true that we deserve death–but Christ has died for us. It is true that we are guilty debtors–but Christ has paid our debts with His own blood. This is the real Gospel! This is the good news! On this let us lean while we live. To this let us cling when we die. Christ has been ‘lifted up’ on the cross, and has thrown open the gates of heaven to all believers.”
- J. C. Ryle
(HT: J.C. Ryle Quotes)

A Powerful Magnet (Col. 3:1)

'If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above . . .'

Robert Jamieson, Andrew R. Fausset and David Brown, writing in 1884:

The contrast is between the believer's former state, alive to the world but dead to God, and his present state, dead to the world but alive to God; and between the earthly abode of the unbeliever and the heavenly abode of the believer. We are already seated there in Him as our Head. . . . Of ourselves we can no more ascend than a bar of iron lift itself up from the earth. But the love of Christ is a powerful magnet to draw us up.

--Commentary: Critical, Practical and Explanatory on the Old and New Testaments (Toldeo, Ohio: Jerome B. James, 1884), 136-37

HT: Jim Lane

The Value Of Everything Will Be Altered

Sobering words from Bishop J. C. Ryle (Practical Religion pg. 40):

A day is coming when banknotes will be as useless as rags, and gold will be as worthless as the dust of the earth. A day is coming when thousands will care nothing for the things for which they once lived, and will desire nothing so much as the things which they once despised. The mansions and palaces will be forgotten in the desire of a “house not made with hands.” The favor of the rich and great will be remembered no more, in the longing for the favor of the King of kings. The silks, and satins, and velvets, and laces, will be lost sight of in the anxious need of the robe of Christ’s righteousness. All will be altered, all will be changed in the great day of the Lord’s return.

Are you ready?
Tullian Tchividjian

When Waves of Trouble Roll

Dear refuge of my weary soul on Thee when sorrows rise
On Thee when waves of trouble roll my fainting hope relies
To Thee I tell each rising grief for Thou alone canst heal
Thy Word can bring a sweet relief for every pain I feel

Hast Thou not bid me seek Thy face and shall I seek in vain?
And can the ear of sovereign grace be deaf when I complain?
No, still the ear of sovereign grace attends the mourner's prayer
O may I ever find access to breathe my sorrows there

--Anne Steele (1716-1778), whose mother died when she was three, who was injured and an invalid the rest of her life, and whose fiance drowned in a river the day before their wedding when she was 21.
 Dane Ortlund

The Love & Justice of God

The cross can be seen as proof of God’s love only when it is at the same time seen as a proof of his justice.”
- John Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, Ill.; InterVarsity Press, 1986), 221.
Of First Importance

Corrections on Personal Corrections (Augustine)

We should never undertake the task of chiding another’s sin unless, cross-examining our own conscience, we can assure ourselves before God, that we are acting from love. If reproaches or threats or injuries, voiced by the one you are calling to account have wounded your spirit, then, for that person to be healed by you, you must not speak til you are healed yourself, lest you act from worldly motives, to hurt and make your tongue a sinful weapon of evil, returning wrong for wrong, curse for curse. Whatever you speak out of a wounded spirit is the wrath of an avenger, not the love of an instructor….And if, as often happens, you begin some course of action from love, and are proceeding with it in love, but a different feeling insinuates itself because you are resisted, deflecting you from reproach of a man’s sin and making you attack the man itself–it were best, while watering the dust with you tears, to remember that we have no right to crow over another’s sin, since we sin in the very reproach of sin if anger at sin is better at making us siners than mercy is at making us kind. (Augustine, Commentary on Galatians —quoted by Jonathan Leeman in The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love), p. 87

The Negation of Christianity

Parents, feeling that their children lack any spiritual axis to their lives, try to impose upon them what is left of the old external morality, so that they are torn between their desire for liberty and the formalism from which they are unable to escape. That is why there are so many neurotics in strict families, among the children of pastors, and where social conformity rates high. This must be clearly and frankly recognized. The majority of our 'cases of nerves' reveal the pathogenic role played by a formalistic upbringing. In liberating such people we are hard put to destroy the conventionalism with which they are still so strongly imbued despite all their rebellion against it.

But formalism is not Christianity. One might even say that it is essentially the negation of it. It was what crucified Christ.

--Paul Tournier, The Healing of Persons, 42
Dane Ortlund

The Opportunity of a Setback

Grace is for the humble, not for the self-satisfied. So a setback, a serious check, the crumbling of a whole majestic world, may be the necessary road to a renaissance. For each of us, a setback can become the opportunity of a return to oneself and a personal meeting with God.

--Paul Tournier, Guilt and Grace: A Psychological Study, 116
Dane Ortlund

Forde on our Functional Semi-Pelagianism

Semi-Pelagianism is the notion that all humans require grace in order to be right with God, but because we have free will we have the natural ability to seek out, respond to, and appropriate this grace. Forde comments--

Officially this position . . . has been rejected by the church. Even the tiny bit [of self-resourced contribution] cannot be reconciled with grace alone. I say it has officially been rejected because I think one can nevertheless say that in actual practice this is the kind of system most people finally settle for. . . . [A] position which is officially rejected becomes nevertheless the basic operating theology of the church.

--Gerhard Forde, Where God Meets Man: Luther's Down-to-Earth Approach to the Gospel (Augsburg 1972), 50; emphasis original

'To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly . . .' --Romans 4:5
Dane Ortlund

You Can't Have It Both Ways

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.

Frederic Bastiat

Jesus was not a Christian

“Many persons hold up their hands in amazement at our assertion that Jesus was not a Christian, while we in turn regard it as the very height of blasphemy to say that He was a Christian. ‘Christianity,’ to us, is a way of getting rid of sin; and therefore to say that Jesus was a Christian would be to deny His holiness.
‘But,’ it is said, ‘do you mean to tell us that if a man lives a life like the life of Jesus but rejects the doctrine of the redeeming work of Christ in His death and resurrection, he is not a Christian?’ The answer is very simple. Of course if a man lives a life like the life of Jesus, all is well; such a man is indeed not a Christian — he is a being who has never lost his high estate of sonship with God.
But our trouble is that our lives do not seem to be like the life of Jesus. Unlike Jesus, we are sinners, and hence, unlike Him, we become Christians; we are sinners, and hence we accept with thankfulness the redeeming love of the Lord Jesus Christ, who had pity on us and made us right with God, through no merit of our own, by His atoning death.”
—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 110-11
Of First Importance

Let the Love of God Really Grip You

“God saw Abraham’s sacrifice and said, ‘Now I know that you love me, because you did not withhold your only son from me’ [Gen. 22:12]. But how much more can we look at his sacrifice on the Cross, and say to God, ‘Now, we know that you love us. For you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love, from us.’ When the magnitude of what he did dawns on us, it makes it possible finally to rest our hearts in him rather than in anything else.”
- Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods (New York, NY: Dutton, 2009), 18.
Of First Importance

The one antithesis of all the ages

“The one antithesis of all the ages is that between the rival formulae: Do this and Live, and, Live and do this; Do and be saved, and Be saved and do. And the one thing that determines whether we trust in God for salvation or would fain save ourselves is, how such formulae appeal to us.”
- B. B. Warfield, Faith & Life (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust), 324-5.
Of First Importance

Insidious Pride

From Jerram Barrs' wonderful book on evangelism, wonderful not because it gives new insights so much as old reminders.

Scripture teaches us that God resists the proud but gladly receives the humble. Humility is to be a lifelong attribute, not simply the attitude of our hearts when we first come to Christ. Every day we are to remember our own need of God's mercy, the problems and failures in our own lives, rather than making ourselves blind to our own sins by concentrating on those of others. . . . Even biblical knowledge can make us proud, not because sound biblical knowledge is a problem, but because of the pride in our hearts that clasps on to anything that will help us to feel a little better about ourselves than about our fellow believers.

--Jerram Barrs, The Heart of Evangelism (Crossway 2001), 164;
Dane Ortlund

Justified Once For All

The glory of salvation is that whoever believes in the Lord Jesus is completely pardoned.  It is not some of his sin that is put away, but all of it.  I rejoice to look upon it as dear Kent does when he sings,
Here’s pardon for transgressions past,
It matters not how black their cast;
And, O my soul, with wonder view,
For sins to come here’s pardon too.
We are plunged into the fountain of redeeming blood and cleansed from every fear of ever being found guilty before the living God.  We are accepted in the Beloved through the righteousness of Jesus Christ, justified once for all and forever before the Father’s face!  Christ said, ‘It is finished,’ and finished it is.  And Oh, what a bliss is this — one of the things that may well stagger those who have never heard it before.  But let them not reject it because it staggers them but rather let them say, ‘This wonderful system which saves and saves completely, in an instant, simply by looking out of self to Christ, is a system worthy of divine wisdom, for it magnifies the grace of God and meets man’s deepest necessities.’”
C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), I:451-452.

Owen: The Ignorance of a Christless Intellect

He that has attained to the greatest height of literature, yet if he has nothing else--if he have not Christ--is as much under the curse of blindness, ignorance, stupidity, dullness, as the poorest, silliest soul in the world. . . . The more abilities the mind is furnished with, the more it . . . strengthens itself to act its enmity against God. All that it receives does but help it to set up high thoughts and imaginations against the Lord Christ.

. . . I hope I shall not need to add anything to clear myself for not giving a due esteem and respect to literature, my intention being only to cast it down at the feet of Jesus Christ, and to set the crown upon his head.

--John Owen, Communion with God (Christian Focus 2007), 185-86
Dane Ortlund