James Montgomery Boice

56 quotes

• If we are justified we will have that nature of God that will increasingly and inevitably express itself in forgiveness, just as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven us, we will be able to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). The Lutherans says: “We are justified by faith alone, but not by a faith which is alone.” It is always faith and life: first, the life of God within; then faith; then, the expression of the inner, divine life in what we do. The conclusion is: if we do not forgive, we are not forgiven. We are not justified. We are not God’s children, regardless of what our profession may be.

• The Bible says that the revelation of God in nature condemns us for our failure to recognize Him. Romans 1:18–20 (NIV) says that “the wrath of God” is being revealed from heaven against all people because “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” No one has ever come to our Lord Jesus Christ through nature alone.

• Finally, you must sell off your sinful pleasures and practices, too. It is not pleasure itself that must be sold off. There are holy pleasures, for the saints are a joyful people. It is only sinful pleasure that must go, for you cannot serve God and sin. You cannot say that you love Christ and fail to keep His commandments. Do you find that hard? Do you draw back? Is that too great a price to pay for salvation? If so, you are not the man of Christ’s parable who finds the treasure and sells all he has to have it. You are not the merchant who trades off everything to possess the great pearl. You have not even properly seen the value of what you are rejecting.

• By insisting on “grace alone” the Reformers were denying that human methods, techniques, or strategies in themselves could ever bring anyone to faith. It is grace alone expressed through the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit that brings us to Christ, releasing us from our bondage to sin and raising us from death to spiritual life.

• Mary met Jesus as her son at the manger, but she did not meet Him as her Savior until she met Him at the cross. Mary needed to lose Jesus as a son in order to find Him as a Savior. Mary needed to take her place with the other disciples, standing as a sinner at the foot of the cross. She needed Jesus to die for her own sins.

• People love sin. Sin hardens their hearts. Therefore, they will not receive the gospel of the kingdom of God when it is preached to them.

• You are not called to poverty in Christ but to the greatest of spiritual wealth. You are not called to disappointment but to fulfillment. You are not called to sorrow but to joy. How could it be otherwise when the treasure is the only Son of God?

• But instead of being con-formed to the world, Christians are to be changed from within to be increasingly like Jesus Christ.

• If we think in terms of our existence here, it means operating within the limits of life on earth. If we are thinking of time, it means disregarding the eternal and thinking only of the now.

• John 6:44 looks at the matter from the Godward side and declares, quite rightly, that no one ever made the first move toward God. We come to God only because God draws us. On the other hand, as the texts about the open door show, God does not show favoritism. Anyone, regardless of who he or she is or where he or she comes from, may be among that number.

• Jesus said, “If anyone enters by me, he will be saved” (John 10:9). That includes you, and it refers to something that can take place now. If you have not yet trusted Jesus, You can trust Him now. Today is the day of salvation.

• Religion is your seeking after a god in your own image. Christianity is God’s seeking you and moving to redeem you by the death of His Son.

• Paul's suffering was neither corrective nor instructive. It was simply permitted by God so that the gospel might spread to others.

• The thief on the cross had to be the luckiest man alive. He was nothing more than a low-life criminal, a loser. He had committed a crime. He was convicted for it, and he was crucified for it. So he had no future; he was going nowhere; or worse, he was going to hell. Yet of all the criminals, on all the crosses, on all the hills in the Roman Empire, he was crucified next to Jesus Christ.

• That truth has sometimes been taken as contradicting John 6:44, which says: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” But that is a mistaken inference. Those who dislike John 6:44 either disregard it or try to use the gospel invitation to overturn its plain meaning. Actually the two verses are not in conflict. John 6:44 looks at the matter from the Godward side and declares, quite rightly, that no one ever made the first move toward God. We come to God only because God draws us. On the other hand, as the texts about the open door show, God does not show favoritism. Anyone, regardless of who he or she is or where he or she comes from, may be among that number.

• Christian’s true weapons are not the weapons of this world but the weapons of truth, per-suasion, and character, the authors write, “The strongholds and pretensions [of this world] can only be demolished under two conditions: one, that we don’t fight with the world’s weapons, but with divine ones; and two, that our obedience is complete. We have been trying to use the world’s weapons of political power, and we have not been sufficiently obedient to the call of Jesus to care as he cares and do as he did.

• In 2 Corinthians Paul says, “It is happening.” In Romans 12 he says, “Let it happen,” thereby putting the responsibility, though not the power to accomplish the transformation, upon us. How does it happen? It happens by the renewing of our minds, and the way our minds become renewed is by study of the life-giving and renewing Word of God. Without that study we will remain in the world’s mold, unable to think as Christians and therefore also unable to act as Christians. We will be Christians in name and by profession, but we will be worldly, unbelieving people in all other respects.

• The true Calvinist is someone whose whole life is devoted to the glory of God.

• The chief problem with television is that, for those who watch it consistently, it undermines and eventually destroys the ability to think. This is because it communicates primarily images, not by words, and words are necessary if we are to perceive logical connections and make judgments as to what is right and wrong.

• Never plead your merits before God. Plead mercy. It is mercy we need. We need it from first to last, and we need it every single day.

• Ten thousand talents. It is hard to estimate exactly what that was worth, and it may in fact only mean the largest debt conceivable, “ten thousand” being one of the largest common numbers and a “talent” being the largest denomination of currency. However, if we do estimate it in dollars, we derive some interesting results. A talent was seventy-five pounds, so ten thousand talents would be 750,000 pounds. We do not know whether they were talents of gold or silver. But since Jesus is trying to exaggerate the contrast between this great debt and the relatively small debt of verse 28, we may suppose that He was thinking of the greater of the two talents, namely, gold. In troy weight there are twelve ounces to a pound. So we are now dealing with 750,000 times 12, or 9 million ounces of gold. Assuming that gold is selling at about $400 an ounce, we come to a figure of $3,600 million (three trillion six hundred million dollars). That is beyond our comprehension, which is precisely Christ’s point. It is an astronomical debt, entirely beyond this servant’s or anybody else’s capacity to pay.

• But secular-ism, more than any other single word, aptly describes the mental framework and value structure of the people of our time.

• To know God as he is, is to love him as he is and to want to be like him.

• Few are guided by principle any longer, only by what they prefer. “You have to decide what’s right for you,” we are told. In such a climate, the only remaining virtue is tolerance, and the only philosophies that are wrong are those that believe in truth.

• As Christians, we must be on guard against Satan’s tactics. We are warned not only against his infusion of his own people into the Christian community, but also against the visible church’s bureaucratic growth (which confuses size and structure with spiritual fruit) and against the infusion of evil into the lives even of believing people (which confuses a loving and forgiving spirit with treason to Christ’s cause). In other words, we are to beware of the secular church and evangelical secularism as well.

• In election and “irresistible” grace God does not disregard or act contrary to the will of any man or woman, as implied above. Rather, He regenerates the individual, as the result of which a will is born that now desires what the old will previously despised. Before, George hated Christ. Now he loves Him and so comes willingly when the gospel is preached. Again, if Mary desires to come, it is not in spite of God’s predetermination in her case but because of it.

• No one should take comfort in sin. The church is impure; we cannot always distinguish between the wheat and tares in this age. But a day is coming when that distinction will be made. The harvest will come. The wheat will be gathered into God’s barn, and the tares will be burned. As a result, we should examine ourselves as to whether we are true children of God or not. And we should be careful to “confirm [our] calling and election - as Peter indicates

• Alan Redpath wrote of Caleb and Joshua’s faith: “The majority measured the giants against their own strength; Caleb and Joshua measured the giants against God. The majority trembled; the two triumphed. The majority had great giants but a little God. Caleb had a great God and little giants.

• So rather than repent of sin and turn for mercy to a God who is altogether sovereign, holy, knowing, and unchangeable, men and women suppress what knowledge they have and refuse to seek out that additional knowledge that could be the salvation of their souls.

• When Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God, He came preaching God’s right to rule over the minds and hearts of all people.

• A parable is a story taken from real life (or a real-life situation) from which a moral or spiritual truth is drawn. Examples are many: the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14), the wedding banquet (Matt. 22:1–14; Luke 14:15–24), the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31–46), and others, including the parables of the kingdom that will occupy our attention in this first set of studies. By my count there are about twenty-seven parables, though some are closely related and may simply be different versions of the same story.

• What is it that leads such a person to reject the truth of God in the first place? According to Paul, it is a determined opposition to the nature of God Himself, which the apostle describes as human “ungodliness and unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18).

• Mary was still thinking in terms of a dead body when Jesus confronted her with His living presence.

• To know God as the sovereign God of the universe is to know ourselves as His subjects, in rebellion against Him. To know God in His holiness is to know ourselves as sinners. To know Him as love is to see ourselves as loved though unlovely. To seek God’s wisdom is to see our own foolishness in spiritual things. Since God is the only standard by which any of those things can be measured, we do not know anything properly unless we know Him. Or to put it in other terms, if we do not know God, we consider ourselves to be sovereign over our own lives, holy, loving, wise, and so on, when in reality we are none of those things.

• Being wholly given over to God now is the essential and best possible preparation for future service.

• One of the remarkable things about Luke’s history of the two criminals crucified with Jesus is that both of them asked for salvation. Have you ever noticed this? “One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at [Jesus]: ‘Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!’” This man met Jesus Christ face to face at the cross; he asked for salvation, and he did not receive it! That fact should terrify us. It is possible to meet Jesus at the cross and fail to receive salvation!

• Think again about 2 Timothy 3. Paul encouraged Timothy to continue on the path of ministry he had been walking because “from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (v.15). Why is the Bible able to do that? It is able to do that because it is “God-breathed” (v. 16). That is, it is the very Word of God and therefore carries within it the authority and very power of God. Yes, and it is useful too. It is useful for “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work

• The Christian counter to relativism is absolute truth, the kind of truth that Paul commended in Philippians 4:8: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, what-ever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” In making this list, Paul deliberately chose pagan rather than Christian virtues. This is because the virtues themselves are universal absolutes. Paul is not telling us to reflect on what we think is lovely or what we feel is admirable, as if the measure of value depended on our personal assessment of it. He is appealing to moral and aesthetic absolutes, saying that it is our duty as Christians to seek out such virtues and to be formed by them. 4.

• When Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God, He came preaching God’s right to rule over the minds and hearts of all people. But that is precisely what the people involved did not want. Adam did not want it. He had great freedom, but he was offended by God’s unreasonable and arbitrary (so he judged) restriction in the case of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

• If we are to see a new reformation, we will have to break away from these patterns and seek to recover the authentic biblical gospel, learning again to think and act in God’s way.

• None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. ROMANS 3:10–12

• Many who begin early will lose their reward (or not even actually come to a true faith in Christ and salvation) because they are approaching God in a false spirit, on the basis of their merit and not on the basis of His grace.

• The secular church is one dominated by the world, as much of the contemporary church is. It is characterized by the world’s wisdom, the world’s theology, the world’s agenda, and the world’s methods. The evangelical church, when it is secular, is one that seeks to do God’s work but in the world’s way. It looks to the media and money rather than to God and His power, which is unleashed through prayer.

• When the tax collector prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” he was thinking of the animal sacrifices because, although Jesus was then present, He had not yet died. When we pray the tax collector’s prayer, we think of Jesus and the way in which God has provided a full and perfect salvation through Him. Do you think of Jesus? Have you prayed that prayer? No one will ever be justified who has not prayed it, nor will anyone be received by God who has not first of all taken his stand with sinners in need of that mercy that God alone provides.

• I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew He moved my soul to seek him, seeking me; It was not I that found, O Savior true; No, I was found of thee.

• Justification because of Christ alone (solus Christus) means that Jesus has done the necessary work of salvation utterly and completely, so that no merit on the part of man, no merit of the saints, no works of ours performed either here or later in purgatory, can add to his completed work.

• These two parables as well as other teachings of the Lord about prayer cut to pieces the false doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God that has been so popular in this century. They teach that God is not the Father of all men. He is the Creator of all. But He is uniquely the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ and becomes the Father only of those persons who believe on Christ.

• No one finds God in mere pious thoughts or religion, either. That is, we will not find God in the mere performance of religious duties, whether the fourfold or sevenfold path to Nirvana, a life of meditation, the “religion” of drugs, or even the ceremonial aspects of Christianity. God has written no overall human efforts to be religious in order that He might write a yes over all who abandon religion and turn to Him in Christ. Religion is your seeking after a god in your own image. Christianity is God’s seeking you and moving to redeem you by the death of His Son.

• Do not make the mistake of counting on your moral record as a way of coming to God. It is your record that gets you into trouble in the first place. Your record will condemn you, no matter how good you think you are or how good you appear in other people’s eyes. Count on the fact that Jesus paid the penalty for your sin, and accept the fact that He is the way for simple, sinful people like you and me to enter heaven.

• The call of God is not restricted by anything you can imagine: race, education, social position, wealth, achievements, good deeds, the lack of them, or anything else. Therefore, there is no reason why you (whoever you are) should not be among the number of those whom God draws to Jesus.

• Is the world or the church is actually irrelevant. The point is simply that the devil is going to bring forward people (whether in the church or out of it) so much like true Christians, yet not Christians, that even the servants of God will not be able to tell them apart.

• Blessed and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we will begin to take on something of the glorious luster of the Lord Jesus Christ and will become increasingly like him.

• Parables differ from fables in that a fable is not a real situation. An example of a fable is any of Aesop’s stories, in which animals talk. In those stories the animals are simply people in disguise. Parables also differ from allegories, since in an allegory each or nearly each detail has meaning. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are essentially allegories. In the parables of Jesus not every detail has meaning. Indeed, to try to force meaning into each one can produce strange and even demonstrably false doctrines. Parables are merely real-life stories from which one or possibly a few basic truths are drawn.

• It is the power of God operating through the teaching of his Word that alone has power “to demolish strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:4).

• So the verse means, “Do not let the age in which you live force you into its scheme of thinking and behaving.

• When we read something that requires us to think, there is distance between ourselves and the printed page. We are not necessarily swept along by the words. We can analyze, ponder, weigh, compare, contrast, and disagree. We can reread a paragraph if we do not understand the argument. We may look up vocabulary we do not know. We may challenge the conclusions. Because there is a distance between ourselves and written words, we do not cheer a well-written sentence or applaud a powerful paragraph, though we may appreciate how well the work is done. Written words promote thinking. Moreover, the better people read and the more they read, the better and longer they can think.