Money Or Morality?

Chuck Colson

Quoting author Chuck Colson:

“Hard work and self-denial were part of our national character — actually our Christian heritage. In recent years, the ‘sound economic values’ have eroded. … But the problem, you see, is that values and the character they produce aren’t divisible. People will not exercise restraint in their economic dealings while casting off restraints in their sexual and social ones. … Or turn on the television. There, people are indulging every sexual desire in the midst of a consumerist paradise — big homes, expensive cars and fashionable clothes. You can do anything you want. The ‘Calvinist restraint’ … didn’t preach chastity or thrift; rather it preached chastity and thrift. That’s because it saw both as proceeding from a common source: the Christian understanding of man’s nature and the purpose for which God created him. If you try to have the one without the other, you will get neither. Far from being obsolete, the old culture war is more relevant than ever. Restoring moral values across the board is essential to rescue a sagging economy as well as renew our nation’s spirit.”

Charles Spurgeon On Believing God

Quoting Charles Spurgeon:

“If we cannot believe God when circumstances seem be against us, we do not believe Him at all.”

The Limited Role Of Government

Quoting columnist Ken Connor:

“The American people must regain the ability to distinguish between wants and needs and must shed the ridiculous notion that government exists to provide either. Our Constitution — drafted by men well acquainted with the abusive capacities of a centralized government — limited the roles and responsibilities of the federal government in order to allow the principle of self-government to flourish in the new nation. Government exists to preserve and protect the sphere of civil freedom within which we can work to meet our needs and our wants. Government does not exist to provide them.”

Ways To Destroy A Church

From the pen of D. A. Carson:

“The ways of destroying the church are many and colorful. Raw factionalism will do it. Rank heresy will do it. Taking your eyes off the cross and letting other, more peripheral matters dominate the agenda will do it–admittedly more slowly than frank heresy, but just as effectively over the long haul. Building the church with superficial ‘conversions’ and wonderful programs that rarely bring people into a deepening knowledge of the living God will do it. Entertaining people to death but never fostering the beauty of holiness or the centrality of self-crucifying love will build an assembling of religious people, but it will destroy the church of the living God. Gossip, prayerlessness, bitterness, sustained biblical illiteracy, self-promotion, materialism–all of these things, and many more, can destroy a church. And to do so is dangerous: ‘If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple’ (1 Cor. 3:17). It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: Leadership Lessons from 1 Corinthians, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993, pp. 83-84)