Quote of the Day

"And shall we not believe that God can convert a sinner when He pleases? Cannot the Almighty, the omnipotent Ruler of heaven and earth, change the character of the creatures He has made?

He changed the water into wine at Cana and converted Saul on the road to Damascus. The leper said, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean" (Matt. 8:2). And at a word his leprosy was cleansed.

Let us not believe, as do the Arminians, that God cannot control the human will, or that He cannot regenerate a soul when He pleases. He is as able to cleanse the soul as the body. If He chose He could raise up such a flood of Christian ministers, missionaries and workers of various kinds, and could work through His Holy Spirit, that the entire world would be converted in a very short time.

If He had purposed to save all men He could have sent hosts of angels to instruct them and to do supernatural works on the earth. He could have worked marvelously in the heart of every person so that no one would have been lost."

Loraine Boettner ~ (The Reformed Faith)

Merry Christmas!

^{Luke 1:67} Now his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit, and prophesied, saying:
       ⁶⁸ “ Blessed is the Lord God of Israel,
      For He has visited and redeemed His people,
       ⁶⁹ And has raised up a horn of salvation for us
      In the house of His servant David,
       ⁷⁰ As He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets,
      Who have been since the world began,
       ⁷¹ That we should be saved from our enemies
      And from the hand of all who hate us,
       ⁷² To perform the mercy promised to our fathers
      And to remember His holy covenant,
       ⁷³ The oath which He swore to our father Abraham:
       ⁷⁴ To grant us that we,
      Being delivered from the hand of our enemies,
      Might serve Him without fear,
       ⁷⁵ In holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.
       ⁷⁶ “ And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest;
      For you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways,
       ⁷⁷ To give knowledge of salvation to His people
      By the remission of their sins,
       ⁷⁸ Through the tender mercy of our God,
      With which the Dayspring from on high has visited^[e] us;
       ⁷⁹ To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,
      To guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Pink Pick

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8).

"Though the wind be imperious in its action, man being unable to regulate it; though it be mysterious in its nature man knowing nothing of the cause which controls it; yet its presence is unmistakable, its effects are plainly evidenced: so it is with every one that is born of the Spirit.

His secret but powerful operations lie beyond the reach of our understanding.

Why God has ordained that the Spirit should quicken this person and not that, we know not, but the transforming results of His working are plain and palpable."

A. W. Pink. "Regeneration Or the New Birth"

Must we believe in the Virgin Birth?

From Albert Mohler

In one of his columns for The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof once pointed to belief in the Virgin Birth as evidence that conservative Christians are “less intellectual.” Are we saddled with an untenable doctrine? Is belief in the Virgin Birth really necessary?

Kristof is absolutely aghast that so many Americans believe in the Virgin Birth. “The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time,” he explains, and the percentage of Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth “actually rose five points in the latest poll.” Yikes! Is this evidence of secular backsliding?

Read rest of column here

Two for Tuesday

Over at 5 Pt. Salt, Pastor Joel Taylor tears down the "God Particle" theory many scientists love to dream of -

The Mystery of the ‘God Particle’–Solved!


Scientists at the $10 billion dollar Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland are all excited. Really excited. LHC is home of the worlds largest particle accelerator. They claim to be closing in on defining the mass of the Higgs boson particle, aka, the God particle. Basically, it is the particle which they purport to be the means by which the entire universe obtains it’s mass. It is the ‘instruction booklet’ that will describe for us how particles, forces and all that stuff interact and bring it all together to form our universe. If seen, it would, allegedly, be the most significant scientific discovery in over 60 years.

But wait, there’s more. - - - Continue reading here



The Chief End of Man has a very nice excerpt of a sermon from St. Augustine - 

Excerpt from St. Augustine’s Christmas Day sermon

“Righteousness has looked down from heaven. in order that people may have a righteousness which is not their own, but God’s…

Unless He had a human birth, we would never attain to the divine rebirth; He was born that we might be reborn. Let nobody hesitate to be reborn; Christ has been born; born with no need of being reborn. The only ones in need of rebirth are those who have been condemned in their first birth. - - - - Read rest of excerpt here

A thorough hatred

(Charles Spurgeon, "Treasury of David")

"You hate all workers of iniquity!" Psalm 5:5

"It is not a little dislike--but a thorough hatred which God bears to workers of iniquity. To be hated by God is an awful thing. O let us be very faithful in warning the wicked around us, for it will be a terrible thing for them to fall into the hands of an angry God!" Charles Spurgeon

"What a vile thing is sin, which makes the God of love and Father of mercies--into an enemy to His creatures; and which could only be purged by the blood of the Son of God!" Thomas Adams

"Not only the work--but worker of iniquity also becomes the object of His hatred." William Gurnall

"Those whom the Lord hates, must perish. What is more due to such impenitent sinners, than hatred? What is more proper than wrath--since they treasure up wrath? Will He entertain those in the bosom of His love--those whom His soul hates? No! Destruction is their portion. What is that which Christ hates? As Christ hates iniquity, so also the "workers of iniquity." David Clarkson

"If God's hatred is against the workers of iniquity--then how great is it against iniquity itself! If a man hates a poisonous creature--he hates poison much more. The strength of God's hatred is against sin--and so should we hate sin, and hate it with all our strength! Sin is an abomination unto God--let it be so unto us!" William Greenhill

(From Puritan Devotionals)