“If an action or a behavior is not organically grown by the Spirit in your life, then you have set up a factory to manufacture plastic fruit, and you’re hanging that plastic fruit on your family tree with little wire hooks.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 120
The Fattest of the Sacred Geese
“It should not be surprising that after I have urged the establishment of a mere Christendom for some time, questions about the First Amendment might arise. It would appear that I am trespassing on the sacred precincts. It would seem that I am strolling across the manicured lawns of the Temple grounds, in order to have a better shot at kicking one of the sacred geese.”
An Essential Thing
“You can have true Christian churches that don’t baptize the right way. You can have real Christian churches that sing the wrong kind of songs. You can have genuine Christian churches that have adopted unedifying forms of church government. But you can’t have Christian churches that have the wrong God. And biblical marriage is one of the creational established and central confessions of faith concerning the nature of the true God.”
Virgins and Volcanoes, p. 6
And In Some Cases, a Really Bad Job
“The elders of the Church do not rule over auto mechanics, or garbage collection, or interior design. First, it is none of their business, and secondly, they would do a bad job.”
No Salt or Sap
“There is nothing more suffocating than being trapped in a Christless Christianity. A Christless Christianity is all ‘Thou shalt not. Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch.’ These things are of no value, Paul says in Colossians, in checking fleshly indulgence (Col. 2:22-23). A Christless Christianity is not really Christianity at all: it has no blood in it, no salt in it, not sap in it. It’s not alive.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 119
Nothing Else to Give
“The principles here is that you export what you manufacture. Whatever your fields are growing, that is what gets loaded onto the ships. Whatever your life and heart are cultivating, that is what you are going to give to your kids. You can’t give anything else.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 114
The Cassandra Effect
“The difficulty manifests itself when accurate predictions are made about moral deteriorations. In such cases, vindication is usually no vindication at all. By the time the predicted moral deterioration is complete, nobody is in any moral shape to analyze what just happened.”
Virgins and Volcanoes, pp. 3-4
Legalism Is Not When Someone Loves God More Than I Do
“Application is not legalism. Obedience is not legalism. Legalism is inventing your own standard. But doing what God said to do the way that God said to do it is not legalism at all: ‘hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee.’”
Keep Your Kids, p. 112
The Ultimate Standard
“God does not just give a set of laws. He tells us to love Him. We aren’t told to grit out teeth and conform ourselves externally to a certain set of actions. The principal command is to love. The ultimate standard is to love.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 112
Don’t Try This at Home
“Ruth was a virtuous woman, but she had some reputation issues: generally you don’t go out to the threshing floor and sleep at a man’s feet until he wakes up. That text is not usually used in courtship seminars.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 106