“Spanking and disciplining your children and correcting attitudes is disciplinary, not punitive, and the whole point of it is so that you can get to a certain place.”
Status and Direction
“Justification establishes the fact of this relationship, while sanctification determines the direction of the relationship.”
Defeated at Their Own Game
“The righteousness of liberty outdoes the legalist, and the joy of liberty outdoes the libertine.”
Both Strict and Free
“Liberty is not a middle position between legalism and license; it is another thing entirely. We have a hard time with this. Liberty is not moderate legalism or moderated license. Liberty is stricter than legalism, and liberty is freer than license.”
Hard Grace, But Grace Still
“Hardship in a story is grace; hardship without a story is just pain.”
The Way It Is
“A garden of grace can contain a tree of law. A garden of law cannot contain a tree of grace”
Poor Pairing
“It is the easiest thing in the world to find a moral standard in the Bible and then to be selfish with it”
Rigorous Grace
“The environment of your home should be full of grace. When you have a home filled with grace, it is not without standards. You are not introducing moral anarchy. Grace is not an amorphous, gelatinous mass. Grace has a backbone. However, when the standards are broken, the heaviest sacrifices in the work of restoration are made by the guardians of grace, not by enforcers of the law, finger-pointers, parental accusers, or people who correct in a nasal tone of self-pity”
Necessary Song
“If there is not a song in it, it is not a biblical sacrifice. Without a song, it is a poor-me, look-at-the-martyr-go sacrifice, and those kinds of sacrifices have a very poor return”
Thanks at the Foundation
“When he took the loaf of bread that represented His own broken body, He picked it up and gave thanks . . . It is a thanksgiving meal, not only because we thank God for what Jesus did for us, but also because He thanked God when He instituted it . . . God is …