Quotes from Michael L. Brown

We think we know that the world around us is decadent and sinful, yet we seem to fit right in. For the most part, we take no outward stand for righteousness; when we do speak and act, we seem more obnoxious than convicting.

God withdrew from the temple in Ezekiel's day because He would not and could not dwell together with idolatry, immorality, and violence. The principle will never change—the Lamb will not be married to someone who remains wedded to his sins, in spite of what some modern teachers claim.

So it was that, figuratively speaking, Jews helped build the house from the foundations up, and then they were told that as Jews they were not welcome.

Whatever we place our attention upon becomes more because we place our attention upon it. If we talk about terror, read about terror, think about terror, watch fear-based programming on the television, then we appreciate terror. This is why all masters of manifestation instruct us to place our attention on the feelings of what we seek, not upon what we do not seek.

Because marijuana is so efficient at cutting off all authentic awareness of our emotional body condition, it allows us to actually believe we are peace-loving people.

New Testament Christianity is not just a formal, polite, correct, and orthodox kind of faith and belief. No! What characterizes it is this element of love and passion, this pneumatic element, this life, this vigor, this abandon, this exuberance—and, as I say, it has ever characterized the life of the church in all periods of revival and of reawakening.

astir. There were outstanding public miracles, and even whole towns turned to the Lord. The name of Jesus was being glorified, and the disciples were one in heart. But sin was also being judged. Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Lord—and both of them fell dead on the spot. Simon the sorcerer tried to buy the gift of God—and he was threatened with damnation for his guilt. Herod gave a speech and

What an unusual rabbi! Today we often hear about the importance of being "inclusive," but what people often mean by inclusion is, "Accept me as I am and affirm me as I am." (I call this "affirmational inclusion.") Yeshua did something much better. He practiced what I call "transformational inclusion": he met people where they were and changed them.

Then why aren't the crowds knocking down our doors for the bread of life? (It may be happening in other parts of the world, but it is certainly not the norm in the United States.) Why aren't they flocking to us for the only real antidote? It's because we don't have the goods! On top of that, we haven't convinced the world that it is sick, starving, and on the verge of eternal death.

The Messiah enters [the Hall of the Sons of Illness] and summons all the diseases and all the pains and all the sufferings of Israel that they should come upon him, and all of them come upon him. And would he not thus bring ease to Israel and take their sufferings upon himself, no man could endure the sufferings Israel has to undergo because they neglected the Torah.22

It is the "gospel" of self, in which Jesus dies to make you into a bigger and better you, a "gospel" in which God is here to serve you and help you fulfill your dreams, and where the measure of all things is not how God feels about it but how you feel about it (or how it makes you feel).

The reality of our situation is that if we are an adult living upon the earth as it is now, we have fully entered the experience of addiction.

This level of emotional integration is only possible when we decrease our pain and discomfort to a point where we view all emotion as "energy in motion," instead of deeming some emotions as threatening and to be avoided, while we find others so seductive that we are driven uncontrollably into activity because of them.

Simply stated, there is not a single verse anywhere in the Bible that pronounces us already forgiven for our future sins (meaning, sins we have not yet committed). Not one verse. Nowhere. Not even a hint of such a concept.

It's clear that our present sins need present forgiveness, not for the purpose of salvation but as part of our relationship with the Father.

To reign in life is to know that you are right with God. It is to know that God is not mad at you but mad about you. It is to know that He is happy with you, approving of you, and pleased with you. It is to know that His love is toward you constantly and His favor continually upon you. To reign in life is to live totally free from crippling guilt and condemnation with an awareness that your right standing before God can never change!4

The hyper-grace teachers are simply wrong when they claim that all our future sins are forgiven the moment we are saved.

Here, then, is a simple rule of thumb for all of us to apply: If the words of Jesus challenge something I believe or challenge the way I live, the problem is not with Jesus. The problem is with me. Charles Spurgeon expressed this in broader, scriptural terms when he said, "If there is any verse that you would like left out of the Bible, that is the verse that ought to stick to you, like a blister, until you really attend to its teaching."31

We are accepted because of Jesus, and that's the ground of our security. Now it is our holy privilege to walk worthy of that high calling, drawing near to God in confidence, "with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water" (Heb. 10:22).

Any behavior we resort to in order to avoid feeling what we are really feeling in any given moment is an addiction.

Then a white man raised his hand and said that, in those days, he had been involved in the Ku Klux Klan. Immediately after that, a black man sitting next to him—but a stranger to him—raised his hand and said that he had been a member of the Black Panthers! The two of them laughed and hugged while the audience cheered. That is how Jesus deals with racial hatred and prejudice, by changing the heart and bringing reconciliation, not by violent confrontation.

The old-fashioned method of evangelism was to make people weep, but the modern "Hollywood" way is to make people laugh. Everybody has to have a jolly good time. . . . We must have plenty of jokes or it would not be a good meeting. That is why there is such a woeful lack of conviction of sin in modern evangelism. The Holy Spirit cannot work in a frivolous atmosphere.

The trouble has generally been . . . that people have emphasized either experience or doctrine at the expense of the other. . . . This is something that has been happening in the church from almost the very beginning. . . . When the whole emphasis is placed upon one or the other, you either have a tendency to fanaticism and excess or a tendency toward a barren intellectualism and a mechanical and a dead kind of orthodoxy.

Expressed in theological terms, "In justification our own works have no place at all, and simple faith in Christ is the one thing needful. In sanctification our own works are of vast importance and God bids us fight, and watch, and pray, and strive, and take pains, and labour."34