Quotes from David F. Wells

Evil by its very nature opposes the purposes of God, but God, in his sovereignty, can make even this evil serve his purposes.

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?

As Jonathan Edwards observed a long time ago, we act on our strongest motive. If our strongest motive, our deepest desire, is to know God, it will generate the discipline that we need to pursue this, because we will want to know God more than anything else. If this is not our strongest motive, we will find ourselves with multiple, alternative, and competing foci.

As Jonathan Edwards observed a long time ago, we act on our strongest motive. If our strongest motive, our deepest desire, is to know God, it will generate the discipline that we need to pursue this, because we will want to know God more than anything else. If this is not our strongest motive, we will find ourselves with multiple, alternative, and competing foci. These will inevitably distract us.

Being transformed also means being unconformed.

Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent.

What was once an open space between law and freedom, one governed by character and truth, is now deserted, so law must now do what character has abandoned.

When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church's undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.

God waits on us to admit him so that he can make his love real. That is how so many people think. And this is how much religion outside of Christian faith has thought about God's love, too.

Sanctification is about living in ways that are consistent with what we already are in Christ.

Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoers might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.

We are summoned to know him only on his terms. He is not known on our terms. This summons is heard in and through his Word. It is not heard through our intuitions.

What has happened, of course, is that over a period of time our society has slowly exited the moral world and it now lives, instead, in a psychological world. The difference is that in one there is right and wrong and in the other there is not. In this other world, we are comfortable or not, psychologically healthy or not, dysfunctional or not, but we are never sinners.

The experience of living in this modernized world has, indeed, shaken many of the assumptions upon which belief rests. It does so most often in indirect ways. It is more the psychology of our times that undermines Christian belief than it is, say, the arguments against it mounted by the new atheists

God's holiness, then, is not only the opposite of evil; it is the measure by which we know evil to be evil.

The evangelical Church today, with some exceptions, is not very inspiring in this regard. It is not being heroic. It is exhibiting too little of the moral splendor that Christ calls it to exhibit. Much of it, instead, is replete with tricks, gadgets, gimmicks, and marketing ploys as it shamelessly adapts itself to our emptied-out, blinded, postmodern world.

Can we, then, set aside the impatience that the Internet tends to breed, and the habits of being distracted which our highly compacted modern lives create, in order to focus on what really matters?

t takes no courage to sign up as a Protestant. After all, millions have done so throughout the West. They are not in any peril. To live by the truths of historic Protestantism, however, is an entirely different matter. That takes courage in today's context.

However, there is a proviso here. Scripture will prove sufficient if we are able to receive from it all that God has put into it.

It is true, of course, that great preachers are always few and far between in any age. But in every age there should be enough preachers to do the job, preachers who are conscientious, who know what it is to labor over Scripture during the week and then on Sunday deliver its truth with some conviction, with some insight, with some depth, and with some application to life, and in the Holy Spirit's power.

What has to be forgiven is not just what we do but who we are, not just our sinning but our sinfulness, not just our choices but what we have chosen in place of God.

God's holiness, then, is not only the opposite of evil; it is the measure by which we know evil to be evil.

No está ante nosotros para ser utilizado. No está ahí suplicándonos poder entrar en nuestro mundo interno y satisfacer nuestras necesidades terapéuticas. Estamos ante él para oír su mandato. Y su mandamiento es que seamos santos, lo cual es algo mucho más grande que ser felices.