Have you ever re-read something–perhaps something you’ve read numerous times–and something grabs your attention as if you had never seen it before? That’s happened to me a number of times while reading the Bible, and I know it happens to others. Well, recently I met with a biblical counselor to address some issues in my life. He began our session by saying that somebody once did a study of questions asked by Jesus in the gospels, and Jesus’s most frequent question was, “What do you want me to do for you?”

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Everybody in the Israelite army thought Goliath was too big to defeat. David thought Goliath was too big to miss.

Douglas Wilson

Doug Wilson:

We must remember that sin doesn’t make sense. If it made sense, it wouldn’t really be sin. Sin is a fundamental irrationality, an attitude that wants to define the world over against the way the Creator of the world determined to define it (Same Sex Mirage, p. xi).

You and I must never look at our past lives; we must never look at any sin in our past life in any way except that which leads us to praise God and to magnify His grace in Christ Jesus… When Paul looks at the past and sees his sin he does not stay in a corner and say, “I am not fit to be a Christian, I have done such terrible things.” Not at all. What it does to him, its effect upon him, is to make him praise God. He glories in grace and says, “And the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus.

Martyn-Lloyd-Jones

You do not “spend” time with God. You “invest” it. Time alone with Him can be one of the greatest time savers of your life. It is in your time alone with the Lord that you can surrender the burden and the anxiety of the load to Him (Philippians 4:6-7; 1 Peter 5:7). You can also find the perspective to be delivered from the truly nonessential things that often seem important. You can find new energy and ideas as you “commit your works to the Lord and your plans will be established (Proverbs 16:3).

When a man’s heart is cold and unconcerned about religion [Christianity], when his hands are never employed in doing God’s work, when his feet are not familiar with God’s ways, when his tongue is seldom or never used in prayer and praise, when his ears are deaf to the voice of Christ in the Gospel, when his eyes are blind to the beauty of the kingdom of heaven, when his mind is full of the world, and has no room for spiritual things-when these marks are to be found in a man, the right word to use about him is the word ‘Dead.’

As Crouch puts it: “All idols begin by offering great things for a very small price. All idols then fail, more and more consistently, to deliver on their original promises, while ratcheting up their demands. … In the end they fail completely, even as they make categorical demands. In the memorable phrase of the psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, idols ask for more and more, while giving less and less, until eventually they demand everything and give nothing.”

Source: When Politics Becomes Your Idol – The New York Times

HT: Dane Ortlund at Strawberry-Rhubarb Theology:

Thomas Goodwin:

God hath ordered his elect, take the whole body and bulk of them, to fall into all sorts of sins, one or other of them; so as there is no sort, kind or degree of sin, no way of sinning, manner of sinning, or aggravation of sin, but in some or other it shall be pardoned, and he doth it to magnify his grace in Christ, in whom he gathers them. —The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 1:156, commenting on Ephesians 1:10

Paul Valentine, senior pastor at Providence Community Church, preached a very good sermon this morning on the sovereignty of God in salvation, which I commend to you. In his sermon Paul shared an outstanding quotation from the late Darrell Champlin, Paul’s professor of Missions at Northland International Univeristy, and missionary in the Belgian Congo and Suriname:

The eternal purpose of God is to call out from every kindred, tongue, people, and nation, a multitude redeemed by the blood of His Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world, over whom He will crown His Son, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, King of kings and Lord of lords forever.

This is the passion of the heart of God that cannot be quenched, the obsession of His mind that cannot be denied, the vision of His eye that cannot grow dim, and the destination to which He has committed His omnipotent, immutable, eternal being: a destination He will not abandon.