Conquer yourself rather than the world.

He was shy, timid, gentle, and kind, but he wrote gruesome and painful books. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, who tear apart and destroy defenseless people. He was too clear-sighted and too wise to be able to live; he was too weak to fight, he had that weakness of noble, beautiful people who are not able to do battle against the fear of misunderstandings, unkindness, or intellectual lies. Such persons know beforehand that they are powerless and go down in defeat in such a way that they shame the victor. He knew people as only people of great sensitivity are able to know them, as somebody who is alone and sees people almost prophetically, from one flash of a face. He knew the world in a deep and extraordinary manner. He was himself a deep and extraordinary world.

Even if your writings were from an angel from heaven I would take this horrible document, and, after having used it as toilet paper, wipe its nose.

If all of sin were a tree, pride would be the root.

Most married people do not desire children; in fact, they dislike them and hold that it is better to live without them because they are poor and do not have the wherewithal to support a family. This is true particularly of those who are given to idleness and laziness and flee from the sweet labor of married life. But the purpose of marriage is not pleasure and ease but the procreation and education of children and the support of a family. This is truly an immense burden, full of great cares and labors. But that is why God created you: to be a husband or a wife and to learn to bear these annoyances. People who do not like children are swine, dunces, and blockheads, not worthy to be called men and women, because they despise the blessing of God, the Creator and Author of marriage.

But justification is surely central for Paul in this sense: It marks the entry point into this holistic salvation, the event by which rebels are accepted back to their Maker on the basis of a sacrifice he himself provided.

When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.

The separation of what the Bible teaches in religious and spiritual matters—as being authoritative in these areas, while saying the Bible contains mistakes where it would be verifiable—is the crux of this form of irrationalism. This is so whether it is taught by those using radical theological terms or those using more conservative terms. In all such cases faith is isolated from reason. It is the religious expression of the prevailing thought-form of modern man.

Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.

We are more terrified by the nightmare of being a monster than by the nightmare of being chased by one, because there is no possible escape from the monster we are, but there is one escape from the monster we are not, even if he catches us. The escape is what we are. And now we have discovered… that we are monsters, killers, murderers, that we are responsible for death. We have come to the deepest and darkest part of the cave. We can descend no lower than this.

Christians need to notice, at this point, that the Reformation said “Scripture alone” and not “the revelation of God in Christ alone.” If you do not have the view of the Scriptures that the reformers had, you really have no content to the word ‘Christ’—and this is the modern drift in theology. Modern theology uses the word without content because ‘Christ’ is cut away from the Scriptures. The Reformation followed the teaching of Christ himself in linking the revelation Christ gave of God to the revelation of the written Scriptures.

A standard premise in most cosmological arguments is that infinite regress of causes is impossible. Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t. Whatever the case with such a regress, it presupposes the creation of things, like causes, to regress. Just how or whether one can get from the created mode to a mode of existence and being that transcends creation, and is of its own kind, is never argued in the proof; it is merely assumed. On that line of argument, there seems to be no real move in the argument from creation to Creator, and no way of seeing how such could be done. So, we must keep the Creator/creature distinction in mind all along.

A sinner can no more repent and believe without the Holy Spirit’s aid than he can create a world.

The Bible allows for divorce. There can be innocent parties in a divorce. But sin generally causes divorces even if divorce is not necessarily a sin. Divorce is not an absence of law. It is, however, an absence of gospel. It occurs in the absence of forgiveness. Divorce is a rejection of God’s gracious gifts. It happens when the husband no longer plays the role of Christ to his wife, or when the wife ceases to emulate the church—when one or both refuse to let Christ and his marriage animate the earthly marriage with repentance and forgiveness.