Charles C. Ryrie

33 quotes

• The third preventive for callousness is the life of prayer (Heb. 4:14–16).

• But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Romans 5:20

• Thus the conscience, though it may lead the unsaved man aright in some areas, cannot save him, since it is defiled, seared, and evil. But in regeneration it is cleansed and used by the Lord to guide the believer in his political, vocational, spiritual, and social relations.

• That word maturity seems to hold the key to the concept of spirituality, for Christian maturity is the growth which the Holy Spirit produces over a period of time in the believer.

• It is more important to be than to do, for if I am what God wants me to be, then I will do what He wants me to do. If I try to promote a program, however well-meaning, without personal holiness, it will be tainted by the defects of my life. It may lack the direction of full knowledge of the Word, or the discernment of maturity, or the direction that comes through unclouded fellowship with the Lord. Primarily we do not need to develop programs, but people.

• A dispensation is a distinguishable economy in the outworking of God’s purpose.

• In other words, the death to sin of Romans 6 is a separation from the power of the sin nature to cause the believer to continue in sin.

• During my years of teaching I know that I have developed idiosyncrasies. I am certain that I am unaware of some of them, but one that I do know about is my invariable reaction the chapel speaker who begins his message something like this: 'Now today, young people, I'm going to be very practical in my message. I'll leave the doctrine to your teachers and the classroom - I just want to be practical.' By this time I have already tuned the speaker out, for he has made a fundamental mistake in disjoining doctrine and practice. All doctrine is practical, and all practice must be based on sound doctrine. Doctrine that is not practical is not healthy doctrine, and practice that is not doctrinal is not rightly based.

• The second is the Word of God used in the life to affect all its parts (notice that soul, spirit, body, and heart are all mentioned in Heb. 4:12).

• These three—fellowship, the Word, and prayer—will enable the believer to experience the new life in his heart: in his intellect, emotions, will, and spiritual life.

• The ministries of the Spirit involve teaching (John 16:12–15), guiding (Rom. 8:14), assuring (Rom. 8:16), praying (Rom. 8:26), the exercise of spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12:7), and warring against the flesh (Gal. 5:17). All of these depend for their full manifestation on the filling of the Spirit (Eph. 5:18).

• To be filled with the Spirit means to be controlled by God.

• While this may simply be another way of saying that spirituality is Christian maturity, it tries to delineate more openly the factors of Spirit-control over a period of time.

• By wholesome I mean balanced. There is nothing more devastating to the practice of spiritual living than an imbalance.

• The mention of the word dispensationalism usually evokes an immediate reaction.

• One of my former teachers repeatedly reminded us that an imbalance in theology was the same as doctrinal insanity.

• A Christian of longer standing may not be spiritual, not because he has had insufficient time but because during the years of his Christian life he has not allowed the Holy Spirit to control him.

• The subject is salvation, one of the greatest themes that could ever challenge the mind of man. Confusion about salvation means disaster, for the message of the Gospel is a matter of eternal life or eternal death.

• The Bible is the greatest of all books; to study it is the noblest of all pursuits; to understand it, the highest of all goals.

• Theology is for everyone. Indeed, everyone needs to be a theologian. In reality, everyone is a theologian—of one sort or another. And therein lies the problem. There is nothing wrong with being an amateur theologian or a professional theologian, but there is everything wrong about being an ignorant or a sloppy theologian. Therefore, every Christian should read theology. Theology simply means thinking about God and expressing those thoughts in some way.

• In the Hebrews passage three preventives are listed for a calloused Christian heart. The first is daily exhortation of one another (3:13).

• By the word genuine I mean biblical, for only in the Bible do we have truth that is indisputably reliable. For this reason, the Bible must be the guide and test for all of our experiences in the spiritual life, for biblical spirituality is the only genuine spirituality.

• Progressive revelation views the Bible not as a textbook on theology but as the continually unfolding revelation of God given by various means throughout the successive ages.

• The solution to the problems of the church today lies in solving the problems of individual Christians, and the remedy is a person—the Holy Spirit.

• Salvation brings into the life a new capacity and with it a new ability to think right, to love God, to purpose to do the will of God, to have a changed heart. The heart of the Christian (and this means his intellectual, emotional, volitional, and spiritual life) can now be true and pure.

• Spirituality is a grownup yet growing relation to the Holy Spirit.

• Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Ephesians 4:32

• There could be no such experience if death means extinction or cessation. Death always means separation, and it does in Romans 6 as well.

• God regenerates (John 1:13) according to His will (James 1:18) through the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit (John 3:5) when a person believes (John 1:12) the gospel as revealed in the Word of God (1 Peter 1:23).

• The two basic attitudes of life that must characterize genuine, biblical spirituality are thankfulness at all times and in all circumstances and the maintenance of unity in that part of the body of Christ.

• The result of these many voices and general lack of agreement on what really are the biblical means to Christian maturity seems to be breeding two kinds of believers. There are some who are not quite sure that they are even on the right track of normal Christian living; there are others who are quite certain that they have arrived at the station. Or, to change the metaphor, there seem to be so many master chefs around that some are so confused by looking only at the various menus that they are starving to death, while others are sampling everything that is offered with resultant indigestion, and a few have sworn allegiance to one and are convinced that all the others are frauds.

• A new Christian cannot be called spiritual, simply because he has not had sufficient time to grow and develop in Christian knowledge and experience.

• A dispensation is a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.