Quotes About Scripture

But, when Scripture makes a clear distinction between the act of creation and the process of preservation, we cannot accept the idea of a progressive creation process.

I keep a lot of my old baseball hats, and if you look in the hats I've had since I started pitching, you'll see 'Philippians 4:13' written on the brim. That's the Scripture that gets me through the day because sometimes you can't do it all by yourself. You can't do it on your own, so you lean on Him.

I'm planning on finishing the Gospels at some point.

Pluralism is denied logically; inclusivism is denied scripturally, and that leaves us with exclusivism... you have to know that Jesus died and believe in it in order to be saved.

Men cannot make Scripture conform to their lifestyle; they must make their lifestyle conform to Scripture.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

We do not first acquire the faith that we bring to Scripture. Scripture encourages faith. "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Romans 10:17).

it's a bad idea to condemn Holy Scripture hastily. When we feel like dismissing Scripture, we should watch out. Perhaps we are not, at that moment, up to what our task requires.

There is no evidence that Jesus himself openly advocated violent actions. But he was certainly no pacifist. "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword" (Matthew 10:34 | Luke 12:51).

Those who can naively affirm the bumper-sticker slogan, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," are oblivious to the question-begging inherent in the formulation: there is no escape from the imperative of interpreting the Word. Bumper-sticker hermeneutics will not do.

As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions, but Scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception.

The Bible undercuts our cultural obsession with sexual fulfillment. Scripture (along with many subsequent generations of faithful Christians) bears witness that lives of freedom, joy, and service are possible without sexual relations. Indeed, however odd it may seem to contemporary sensibilities, some New Testament passages (Matt. 19:10–12, 1 Cor. 7) clearly commend the celibate life as a way of faithfulness.

First, we should guard against falling into a habit of reading New Testament ethical texts in one mode only. If we read the New Testament and find only laws, we are obviously enmeshed in grave hermeneutical distortion. Likewise, if we read the New Testament and find only timeless moral principles, we are probably guilty, as Barth warned, of evading Scripture's specific claims upon our lives.

The New Testament has a normative role in Christian theology and ethics that is different from the Old Testament's role. We do not have a simple, undifferentiated canon running from Genesis to Revelation. The claim that Jesus' death and resurrection is the central decisive act of God for the salvation of humankind means that the cross becomes the hermeneutical center for the canon as a whole. Thus, within the canon the New Testament has a privileged hermeneutical function.

the Bible contains the record of a dynamic, developing tradition of thought, and the aim of interpretation should be to let Scripture involve its reader in its own process of thought, so that the reader's own thinking may continue in the direction it sets

T]here is no greater strengthener of sin, and destroyer of the soul, than Scripture misapplied (317).

Esteem the church fathers and other writers, but value none of them as equivalent to the word of God.

any Christian man who wants to serve the Lord, in any role and at any level, must begin by devoting himself to God's Word. A man who is weak in the Word of God will be of little use for service, for we cannot truly serve God effectively in our own knowledge and strength. But God's Word stirs up in us the faith and spiritual strength needed to serve Him.

For our marriages to regain the love and unity God designed them to have, it is not merely a matter of wives submitting to their husbands in the Lord. Husbands, in fact, have the first and greatest responsibility. As we gain insight about our wives through our shared lives together and our attentive and cherishing interest in the affairs of their hearts, we must nourish our wives with God's Word, and with our own encouraging and upbuilding words informed by Scripture.

We are not called to give lifestyle tips or the self-help plumbing that today's worldly men and women crave. The Bible says the gospel is the "power of God for salvation to everyone who believes." (Romans 1:16b), so we must proclaim it.

But we should always emphasize the actual teaching of the Bible in our witness, because it is the Word of God that brings people to faith. Peter

These Greek-speaking city folk were no country bumpkins, like those they called pagans—pagani—a term meaning "rustics" or "hicks."18 They inhabited one of the liveliest, most urbane, and culturally diverse regions on earth. Many could read and write; the early Christians, like the Jews, considered themselves People of the Book and prized the ability to read Scripture.

it is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this. Yet maybe they cannot answer a second call because they have not yet completed the first task. Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

It seems we are often guilty of being more interested in defending God's Word than in studying it.