Category: Quotations

The finest art of communication is not learning how to express your thoughts. It is learning how to draw out the thoughts of another.

(Tedd Tripp, Shepherding a child’s heart)

In his book, Shepherding a child’s heart, Tedd Tripp asserts that biblical parenting involves both rich, full communication and the use of the rod. He challenges parents not to think that communication with their child is simply the child hearing what the parent has to say, but actually talking with the child.

Tripp’s admonition and encouragement are applicable not only to parent-child relationships, but to all relationships in the church, in that communication is not merely one-sided, but involves hearing what the other has to say (and drawing it out, if need be).

There can be no recovery of delight in the Great Commission without a renewal of the church’s conviction that it not only came into being but is sustained in every moment by the will and work of the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. It is this confidence that motivates a missionary in Saudi Arabia to labor for years before witnessing a single conversion. So why do so many of us, as American Christians, measure success in our own churches by other standards, based on what we can accomplish and see on an impressive scale?

— Michael Horton, The Gospel Commission

John Piper describes one element of saving faith, and laments the spurious faith held by some:

What does faith receive in order to be justifying faith? The answer, of course, is that faith receives Jesus. … But we must make clear what this actually means, because there are so many people who say they have received Christ and believed on Christ but give little or no evidence that they are spiritually alive.

…

One way to describe this problem is to say that when these people “receive Christ,” they do not receive him as supremely valuable. They receive him simply as sin-forgiver (because they love being guilt-free), and as rescuer-from-hell (because they love being pain-free), and as healer (because they love being disease-free), and as protector (because they love being safe), and as prosperity-giver (because they love being wealthy), and as creator (because they want a personal universe, and as Lord of history (because they want order and purpose).

…

Such a “receiving of Christ is the kind of receiving an unregenerate, “natural” person can do. This is a “receiving” of Christ that requires no change in human nature.

John Piper, in Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God.

We are cautioned in Scripture to avoid two extremes regarding knowledge: thinking too much of thinking that is not done with the purpose of God’s glory in mind (this knowledge “puffs up” with pride), and thinking too little of thinking and spending more mental effort on sports (or the soaps) than on Scripture.

Regarding the first, Douglas Wilson says the pomposity of believers in academia gets a “raspberry” from him, and deserves the “horse-laugh of Christendom.” Even better:

“I mentioned earlier that proud flesh bonds to many strange things indeed, and I forgot to mention scholarship and footnotes. To steal a thought from Kierkegaard, ‘Many scholars line their britches with journal articles festooned with footnootes in order to keep the Scriptures from spanking their academically-respectable pink, little bottoms.'”

Indeed.

>”The time has come for wimpy, conservative, Bible-believing evangelical Christians to get over their cowardice and to parley with God until they decide to be courageous enought to tell the truth to a watching world, then to get ready because God will give them an army to follow after. God bless us all.”

–Paige Patterson, in Pastoral Leadership for Manhood and Womanhood.