“Sinners don’t do well on Easy Street.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 25
Inverse Sabbaths
“We rest for one day and are refreshed and enabled to work before Him for the other six. But the modern man wants to work for five in order to play for two, and if the union negotiations are successful, work for four in order to play for three.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 25
Drunk in the Gutter
“Although the memory is dim, we still refer today to ‘the Protestant work ethic.’ This is like an impoverished man in the gutter recalling how wealthy his great-grandfather was.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 23
Affection, Not Affectation
“Next to the Scriptures, nothing makes a sermon more to pierce, than when it comes out of the inward affection of the heart without any affectation.”
William Ames, as quoted in Kent Hughes, Power in Weakness
Rebellion in Seed Form
“To understand our culture’s inability to resist the claims of ‘gay activists,’ we must understand that they are reasoning from premises held by most of straight America, i.e. that sexual autonomy and sexual wisdom are consistent with one another.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 21
Sin Is a Lousy Teacher
“We have come to believe that experience in sin qualifies us to speak authoritatively. Christians should know better. The only man who can speak with full authority on the subject of sin is the Lord Jesus—who never sinned.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 20
As In Our Own Time
“Malcolm Muggeridge once quoted the wit who identified a similar problem in the time of Britain’s decline: ‘Everything was at sea except for the fleet.’”
The Cultural Mind, p. 17
The Three Branches
“One of the principal causes of grief in our broader culture today is that we have taken His instructions to Larry and assigned them to Moe, and the instructions given to Curly have been taken up by Larry.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 16
Principled Thought
“As we look at the eternal antithesis between right and wrong as it looked when clothed in the details of another time, we will be equipped to see what can never be buried and what should be. We will see ideological fads and fashions, as well as the permanent things.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 14
The Devil’s Stragglers
“The biblical pattern of evangelism was not at all like our modern method of picking off the devil’s stragglers, but rather a pattern of bringing the good news to household after household.”
The Cultural Mind, p. 8