Wisdom from some guys the Church loves ...

Admiring them and eulogizing them is a poor replacement for listening to them and learning from them!

"Evermore the Law must prepare the way for the gospel. To overlook this in instructing souls is almost certain to result in false hope, the introduction of a false standard of Christian experience, and to fill the Church with false converts ... Time will make this plain." - Charles Finney

(Time HAS indeed made it plain! See my last post)

"Satan, the god of all dissension stirs up daily new sects. And last of all which of all others I should never have foreseen or once suspected, he has raised up a sect such as teach that men should not be terrified by the law, but gently exhorted by the preaching of the grace of Christ." (Martin Luther)

"I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the Law."

"Lower the Law and you dim the light by which man perceives his guilt; this is a very serious loss to the sinner rather than a gain; for it lessens the likelihood of his conviction and conversion. I say you have deprived the gospel of its ablest auxiliary [its most powerful weapon] when you have set aside the Law. You have taken away from it the schoolmaster that is to bring men to Christ . . . They will never accept grace till they tremble before a just and holy Law. Therefore the Law serves a most necessary purpose, and it must not be removed from its place." (Charles Haddon Spurgeon)

"First, then, before you can speak peace to your hearts, you must be made to see, made to feel, made to weep over, made to bewail, your actual transgressions against the Law of God." (George Whitefield)

"...it is the ordinary method of the Spirit of God to convict sinners by the Law. It is this which, being set home on the conscience, generally breaketh the rocks in pieces. It is more especially this part of the Word of God which is quick and powerful, full of life and energy and sharper than any two-edged sword."

"Before I can preach love, mercy and grace I must preach sin, law and judgment."(John Wesley)

"Ask Paul why [the Law] was given. Here is his answer, 'That every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God' (Romans 3:19). The Law stops every man's mouth. I can always tell a man who is near the kingdom of God; his mouth is stopped. This, then, is why God gives us the Law—to show us ourselves in our true colors."

"The law can only chase a man to Calvary, no further." (D.L.Moody)

And what more shall we say? Time fails us to tell of John Wycliffe, John Newton, Jonathan Edwards, C.S.Lewis, J.I.Packer, John Bunyan, A.W.Pink, St.Augustine, Matthew Henry, J.C.Ryle, A.B.Earle, A.W.Tozer, D.Martyn Lloyd-Jones, John Stott, John MacArthur, and a multitude of others who God has used to preach His perfect Law (which "converts the soul" Psalm 19:7), and shut men up under that Law, and bring them to the foot of a blood-stained cross.

Pastor Phil