Challies quotes from a section of Iain Murray’s forthcoming biography of John MacArthur. I couldn’t agree with these words more, and I can’t praise my wife enough for embodying every virtue mentioned!  That’s why I put her picture next to this quote!

Murray writes:

If whom we marry is the next most important thing to conversion itself, it is doubly so for every pastor. John Watson, advising students for the ministry at this point, warned that of all men “they ought to be most careful in the choice of a wife, for she may be either a help or a hindrance not merely to his comfort but to his work.” A good wife, he continued,

advises her husband on every important matter, and often restrains him from hasty speech … receives him weary, discouraged, irritable, and sends him out again strong, hopeful, sweet-tempered. The woman is in the shadow and the man stands in the open, and it is not until the woman dies and the man is left alone that the people or he himself knows what she has been.

MacArthur would have no doubt about the truthfulness of Watson’s words. He would go further and say with Spurgeon,

A true wife is the husband’s better half, his flower of beauty, and his heart’s treasure. In her company he finds his earthly heaven; she is the light of his home, the comfort of his soul.

Amen!  Thank you, love.  I’m grateful to God for you.

Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you. (Heb. 13:17)

“Happy pastors make healthy people.”

(John Piper, “No One Will Take Your Joy from You;” check around minute 43)

From David Brook’s NYT op-ed, “Creed or Chaos“:

Rigorous theology provides believers with a map of reality. These maps may seem dry and schematic — most maps do compared with reality — but they contain the accumulated wisdom of thousands of co-believers who through the centuries have faced similar journeys and trials.

Rigorous theology allows believers to examine the world intellectually as well as emotionally. Many people want to understand the eternal logic of the universe, using reason and logic to wrestle with concrete assertions and teachings.

Rigorous theology helps people avoid mindless conformity. Without timeless rules, we all have a tendency to be swept up in the temper of the moment. But tough-minded theologies are countercultural. They insist on principles and practices that provide an antidote to mere fashion.

Rigorous theology delves into mysteries in ways that are beyond most of us. For example, in her essay, “Creed or Chaos,” Dorothy Sayers argues that Christianity’s advantage is that it gives value to evil and suffering. Christianity asserts that “perfection is attained through the active and positive effort to wrench real good out of a real evil.” This is a complicated thought most of us could not come up with (let alone unpack) outside of a rigorous theological tradition.

HT: JT

“Shredded flesh against unforgiving wood, iron stakes pounded through bone and wracked nerves, joints wrenched out of socked by the sheer dead weight of the body, public humiliation before the eyes of family, friends, and the world — that was death on the cross, ‘the infamous stake’ as the Romans called it, ‘the barren wood, ’ the maxima mala crux. Or as the Greeks spat it out, the stauros. No wonder no one talked about it. No wonder parents hid their children’s eyes from it. The stauros was a loathsome thing, and the one who dies on it was loathsome too, a vile criminal whose only use was to hang there as a putrid decaying warning to anyone else who might follow his example.

That is how Jesus died.”

— Greg Gilbert
“The Gospel: God’s Self-Substitution for Sinners” in Don’t Call It a Comeback, ed. Kevin DeYoung
(Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2011), 72

HT: Of First Importance

“Whatever cultural shifts take place around us, whatever socio-political concerns claim our attention, whatever anxieties we may feel about the church as an institution, Jesus Christ crucified, risen, reigning, and now in the power of his atonement, calling, drawing, welcoming, pardoning, renewing, strengthening, preserving, and bringing joy, remains the heart of the Christian message, the focus of Christian worship, and the fountain of Christian life.  Other things may change; this does not.”

–J. I. Packer, Celebrating the Saving Work of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J.I. Packer (Paternoster, 1998), p. 46.

“This is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.” (Isaiah 66:2)

Those of you that are yet strangers to Christ, what can I say to excite you to come and walk with God?  If you love honor, pleasure, and a crown of glory, come and seek it where it alone can be found.  Come, put on the Lord Jesus.  Come, haste away and walk with God, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.  Stop, stop, O sinner!  Turn, for the end of that way you are now walking in, however right it may seem in your blinded eyes, will be eternal destruction of body and soul.  Make no tarrying… step not one step further on in your present walk.  For how do you know the next step you take will not be into hell?  Death may seize you, judgment may find you, and then the great gulf will be fixed between you and endless glory forever and ever.  Lay these things to heart.  In the strength of Jesus say, “Farewell lust of the flesh, I will no more walk with thee!  Farewell lust of the eye, and pride of life!  Farewell carnal acquaintance and enemies of the cross, I will no more walk and be intimate with you!  Welcome Jesus, welcome thy word, welcome thy ordinances, welcome thy Spirit, welcome thy people, I will henceforth walk with you.”  O that there may be in you such a mind!  God will seal it with the broad seal of heaven, even the signet of his Holy Spirit.  Yes, he will, though you have been following after the desires of your desperately wicked hearts ever since you have been born.  The precious blood of Jesus Christ, if you come to the Father in and through him, shall cleanse you from all sin.

–Randall J. Pederson (ed.), George Whitefield, Daily Readings, March 16.

“The smallest drop of grace is a greater sign of Christ’s love than all the glory and pleasures of the earth.”

David Clarkson, Works, cited in Richard Rushing (ed.), Voices from the Past: Puritan Devotional Readings, p. 77

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17)

“We are not the reason the gospel works; the gospel is the reason the gospel works.”

–Ligon Duncan, from the Foreword to Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching

“They want to be teachers of the law but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.” (1 Tim. 1:6)

“The kind of God we believe in determines the kind of sermons we preach.  A Christian must at least be an amateur theologian before he can aspire to be a preacher.”

–John Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 93.

“So pray and so preach that, if there are no conversions, you will be astonished, amazed, and broken-hearted.  Look for the salvation of your hearers as much as the angel who will sound the last trump will look for the waking of the dead!  Believe your own doctrine!  Believe your own Saviour!  Believe in the Holy Ghost who dwells in you!  For thus shall you see your heart’s desire, and God shall be glorified.”

Charles H. Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry, p. 187.