Sinclair B Ferguson Quotes

The foundation of worship in the heart is not emotional...it is theological.

Failure to deal with the presence of sin can often be traced back to spiritual amnesia – forgetting our new, true, real identity. As a believer, I am someone who has been delivered from the dominion of sin and who therefore is free and motivated to fight against the remnants of sin in my heart. You must know, rest in, think through, and act upon your new identity – you are in Christ

True faith takes its character and quality from its object. Its strength therefore depends on the character of Christ. Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!

As the early church fathers delighted in saying, Christ took what was ours so that we might receive what was His.

The benefits of the gospel are in Christ. They do not exist apart from him. They are ours only in him. They cannot be abstracted from him as if we ourselves could possess them independently of him.

So long as Jesus Christ is there, in heaven before God for us, our salvation will last.

Karl Barth once wittily remarked, “One can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.

When we see salvation whole—its every single part is found in Christ, we must beware lest we derive the smallest drop from somewhere else.

God protects us from Satan even at times when we are not aware of His protection. But how can we develop Jesus-like discernment? By Spirit-aided digestion of the solid food of God's wisdom.

Here are wonders upon wonders: the Strong One is weak; the Infinite One lies in a manger; the Prince of Life dies; the Crucified One lives; the Humiliated One is glorified. Meekness and majesty, indeed! Behold, then, your newborn King! Come and worship Him!

Yes, people will tell us they believe in a “God of love.” But they are self-deceived, and their lives reveal it. They neither love Him with heart, soul, mind, and strength in return, nor do they worship Him with zeal and energy. The truth is that their mantra “My God is a God of love” is a smokescreen, a phantasm of their imagination. Underneath it all is a deep mistrust of God—otherwise, why not yield the whole of life in joyful abandon to whatever He says or asks?

The work of atonement took place in the presence of the God of heaven. Indeed, it involved a transaction within the fellowship of the persons of the eternal Trinity in their love for us: the Son was willing, with the aid of the Spirit, to experience the hiding of the Father's face. The shedding of the blood of God's Son opened the way to God for us (Acts 20:28). That is both the horror and the glory of our Great High Priest's ministry. Terrible

That life begins with God's working, not with our "doing.

Seeing human need with perfect clarity, Jesus felt it with unparalleled intensity.

Thus the essence of legalism is rooted not merely in our view of law as such but in a distorted view of God as the giver of his law.

The human heart” wrote Calvin, “has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.

Living in the Spirit means a daily commitment to please Christ and not to please self.

When I am tempted and feel the power of sin and its tug on my affections, the gospel gives me something to say: 'Christ bled and died for this sin—I will therefore have nothing to do with it. I am now united to Christ by the indwelling of the Spirit—how can I drag him into my sin?

Faith is not the ground or basis upon which we are justified, but the means, the "instrument," by which we are united to Christ, in whom our justification, our "right-wising" with God, has been accomplished.

Go back to the school in which you will make progress in being a Christian. Study your lessons, settle the issue of ambition, make Christ your preoccupation-and you will learn to enjoy the privileges of being truly content.

The subtle danger here should be obvious: if we speak of the cross of Christ as the cause of the love of the Father, we imply that behind the cross and apart from it he may not actually love us at all. He needs to be “paid” a ransom price in order to love us.

the Son of God took our nature and came "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Rom. 8:3) in order to exchange places with Adam, so that His obedience and righteousness might for our sakes be exchanged for Adam's (and our) disobedience and sin (Rom. 5:12-21). Exchange

The gospel is designed to deliver us from this lie. For it reveals that behind and manifested in the coming of Christ and his death for us is the love of a Father who gives us everything he has: first his Son to die for us and then his Spirit to live within us.27

Repentance, turning from sin, and degrees of conviction of sin do not constitute the grounds on which Christ is offered to us. They may constitute ways in which the Spirit works as the gospel makes its impact on us. But they never form the warrant for repentance and faith.

Third, hear our loss of focus on the gospel in our songs. This is no comment on musical styles and tastes, but simply an observation about the lyrical content of much that is being sung in churches today. In many cases, congregations unwittingly have begun to sing about themselves and how they are feeling rather than about God and His glory.

Confessional orthodoxy coupled with a view of a heavenly Father whose love is conditioned on his Son’s suffering, and further conditioned by our repentance, leads inevitably to a restriction in the preaching of the gospel. Why? Because it leads to a restriction in the heart of the preacher that matches the restriction he sees in the heart of God!

For if we seek salvation, the very name ofJesus teaches us that he possesses it.

Jesus' sinlessness should not be equated with emotionlessness.

In undiluted monergism, He called the galaxies into being, and He gives life to the dead in the same way

When we see salvation whole, its every single part is found in Christ, And so we must beware lest we derive the smallest drop from somewhere else.

If you are going to resist the desires of the flesh (negative), you will need to live in the power of the Holy Spirit and walk according to his disciplines (positive).

I am not asking you to do that because the tree is ugly—actually it is just as attractive as the other trees. I don’t create ugly, ever!11 You won’t be able to look at the fruit and think, That must taste horrible. It is a fine-looking tree. So it’s simple. Trust me, obey me, and love me because of who I am and because you are enjoying what I have given to you. Trust me, obey me, and you will grow.

When we behold the glory of Christ in the gospel, it reorders the loves of our hearts, so we delight in him supremely, and the other things that have ruled our lives lose their enslaving power over us.

The knowledge of our union with Christ...gives us confidence in prayer. It was when Jesus had begun to expound the closeness of this union that he also began to introduce the disciples to the true heart of prayer. If Christ abides in us and we abide in him, as his word dwells in us, and we pray in his name, that God hears us (Jn 15:4-7). But all of these expressions are simply extensions of the one fundamental idea: If I am united to Christ, then all that is his is mine. So long as my heart, will and mind are one with Christ's in his word, I can approach God with the humble confidence that my prayers will be heard and answered.

...we are always entertaining the delusion that we will go on forever in this world. The result is that the very things which ought to be of assistance to us in our pilgrimage through life, become chains which bind us.

Such contentment is never the result of the momentary decision of the will. It cannot be produced merely by having a well-ordered and thought-through time- and life-management plan calculated to guard us against unexpected twists of divine providence. No, true contentment means embracing the Lord's will in every aspect of His providence simply because it is His providence. It involves what we are in our very being, not just what we do and can accomplish.

you cannot destroy love for the world merely by showing its emptiness. The world-centered love of our hearts can be expelled only by a new love and affection-for God and from God. The love of the world and the love of the Father cannot coexist in the same heart

Thus the motivation, energy and drive for holiness are all found in the reality and power of God's grace in Christ. And so if I am to make any progress in sanctification, the place where I must always begin is the gospel of the mercy of God to me in Christ Jesus.

The fallacy here? The subtle movement from seeing forsaking sin as the fruit of grace that is rooted in election, to making the forsaking of sin the necessary precursor for experiencing that grace. Repentance, which is the fruit of grace, thus becomes a qualification for grace. This

Fast-forward to Calvary and the coming of the Spirit. As Moses ascended Mount Sinai and brought down the Law on tablets of stone, now Christ has ascended into the heavenly Mount, but in contrast to Moses, he has sent down the Spirit who rewrites the law not now merely on tablets of stone but in our hearts.

True discernment means not only distinguishing the right from the wrong; it means distinguishing the primary from the secondary, the essential from the indifferent, and the permanent from the transient. And, yes, it means distinguishing between the good and the better, and even between the better and the best.

The ongoing function of God’s law is not to serve as a standard to be met for justification but as a guide for Christian living. Thus, according to the Confession of Faith: True believers be not under the law as a covenant of works to be thereby justified or condemned yet it is of great use to them as well as to others as a rule of life.34

growing in faith and love for Christ, revealed as He is in Scripture, will be the greatest of all preservatives against being led astray. The person who is saturated in the teaching and spirit of the Gospels will have his or her senses "trained ... to distinguish good from evil" (Heb. 5:14, NIV) and to know what is truly Christ-like and Christ-honoring.

Underline this thought: assurance, peace, access to God, knowledge that He is our Father, and strength to overcome temptation all depend on this-the Son of God took our flesh and bore our sins in such a way that further sacrifice for sin is both unnecessary and unintelligible. Christ died our death, and now in His resurrection He continues to wear our nature forever, and in it He lives for us before the face of God. He could not do more for us than He has done; we need no other resources to enable us to walk through this world into the next. You and I need a Savior who is near us, is one with us, understands us. All of this the Lord Jesus is, Hebrews affirms. Fix your gaze on this Christ and your whole Christian life will be transformed.

In the New Testament the basic command of old covenant life, 'Be holy as I am holy', now means, 'Become like Jesus.' God involves himself in this work as the triune Lord: the Father commands it; the Son has died to provide the resources for it; the Spirit indwells us in order to effect it in our lives. As Augustine famously prayed, God commands what he wills and gives what he commands.

The Church’s Confession of Faith remained unaltered. But it would be naïve scholarship that extrapolated from what was professed to what was preached and indeed from what was preached to what was possessed. Every pastor should know this and therefore should never assume that everyone listening to him has been gripped by the wonder of God’s grace—even if they have confessed the church’s creed.

Before all time; prior to all worlds; when there was nothing "outside of" God Himself; when the Father, Son, and Spirit found eternal, absolute, and unimaginable blessing, pleasure, and joy in Their holy triunity-it was Their agreed purpose to create a world. That world would fall. But in unison-and at infinitely great cost-this glorious triune God planned to bring you (if you are a believer) grace and salvation.

The genius of the divine way of salvation by faith is that in it we are personally, actively united to Jesus Christ, but in a way that contributes nothing to His work. Faith is by definition noncontributory; it is the reception of Christ, not an addition to His finished work. B. B. Warfield finely puts it this way: It is not faith that saves, but faith in Jesus Christ.... It is not, strictly speaking, even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or in the nature of faith, but in the object of faith.14 In this sense, even though we are actively involved in faith, we are passive with respect to the accomplishing of justification. In the deepest sense, then, it is by grace that we are saved through faith, and that (whether the grace, the faith, or the union of the two in justification) is the gift of God; it is not of works, lest anyone should boast (Eph. 2:8-9; notice the reiteration of the theme of non-boasting of Rom. 3:27).

What was injected into Eve’s mind and affections during the conversation with the Serpent was a deep-seated suspicion of God that was soon further twisted into rebellion against him. The root of her antinomianism (opposition to and breach of the law) was actually the legalism that was darkening her understanding, dulling her senses, and destroying her affection for her heavenly Father. Now, like a pouting child of the most generous father, she acted as though she wanted to say to God, “You never give me anything. You insist on me earning everything I am ever going to have.

Biblical repentance, then, is not merely a sense of regret that leaves us where it found us. It is a radical reversal that takes us back along the road of our sinful wanderings, creating in us a completely different mind-set. We come to our senses spiritually (Luke 15:17). Thus the prodigal son’s life was no longer characterized by the demand “give me” (v. 12) but now by the request “make me . . .” (v. 19). This lies on the surface of the New Testament’s teaching. Regret there will be, but the heart of repentance is the lifelong moral and spiritual turnaround of our lives as we submit to the Lord.

Can you take in what you have overheard in the High Priestly Prayer of John 17? It is like a light momentarily switched on in a darkened room and then extinguished. Did you really see such treasures? Has Jesus actually prayed that my faith will not fail (Luke 22:31-32) and that I will be kept by God's power for such glory (1 Peter 1:5-11)? Is even my name engraved on His shoulders and inscribed on His heart? Do you understand how much your High Priest cares for you and loves you? It is almost as though He were saying, "Father, My glory will be incomplete unless You keep this promise-that My beloved disciples can see it and share it.

The message of the incarnate Christ is glorious indeed, but it must never be severed from the message of the indwelling Christ. He who came for us as a baby now dwells in us as the Lord of glory through His Spirit. That is His gift to us. The indwelling Christ seeks one gift from you in return. You.

And, with a disregard for other things, he cherished and experienced That blessed communion with God about which he wrote.

A wrong view of God leads inevitably to a failure to enjoy and grow in His grace. Failure to appreciate His love, His kindness and generous heart leads eventually to a life which bears no fruit and makes no progress. The lesson is clear: if you would grow in grace, learn what grace is. Taste and see that the Lord is good. —SINCLAIR B. FERGUSON (1948–), Scottish preacher and theologian

This is thought to be Jesus’s best-loved parable, usually because our eyes are on the prodigal and his father. But as with jokes, so with parables: there is a principle in both of “end stress.” The “punch line” comes at the end. That being the case the alarming message here is that the spirit of the elder brother, the legalist, is more likely to be found near the father’s house than in the pig farm—or in concrete terms, in the congregation and among the faithful. And sometimes (only sometimes?), it appears in the pulpit and in the heart of the pastor.

bears repeating: in Eve’s case antinomianism (her opposition to and rejection of God’s law) was itself an expression of her legalism!

These considerations give us some clues as to why legalism and antinomianism are, in fact, nonidentical twins that emerge from the same womb. Eve’s rejection of God’s law (antinomianism) was in fact the fruit of her distorted view of God (legalism).

But, as Paul is at pains to stress, the law is good, and just, and holy.50 And we need to understand, sense, feel, and then delight in the grace of law.51 For unless we are persuaded that God has shown his grace in his law as well as in his Son, all we will hear and see at Sinai is thunder and lightning.

Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.

The offer of the gospel is to be made not to the righteous or even the repentant, but to all. There are no conditions that need to be met in order for the gospel offer to be made.

To become a Christian believer is to be brought into a reality far grander than anything we could ever have imagined. It means communion with the triune God.

Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. But the final rehearsed words, “Treat me as one of your hired servants” are smothered by his father’s embrace! He will not have his son home only on condition that he “does penance” in order to work his way back into his father’s grace. He does not need to “repent enough” to be accepted. Sinclair B. Ferguson. The Whole Christ (Kindle Locations 1913-1916). Crossway.

What the prophets of God did spiritually, the Prophet of God did quite literally and physically.

God possesses personal being in a unified, uncreated, eternal, tri-personal manner.

Resolved, Never to do any thing, which I should be afraid to do, if I expected it would not be above an hour before I should hear the last trump.

Faith and repentance are not static, the decision of a moment; they are the lifelong realities of a new heart (8:10; 10:16).

There had been occasions when David could have seized position and power by means that would have compromised his commitment to the Lord.

True Christian liberty, unlike the various "freedom" or "liberation" movements of the secular world, is not a matter of demanding the "rights" we have.

One day Christ will return in the full glory of His resurrection power. The light will be switched on permanently. The Lamb of God who took away the sin of the world will be present in the new heavens and earth as their lamp. Neither sun nor moon will be needed (Rev. 21:23). As He will be the Life, so He will be the Light of the new world. "Jesus said to her, `I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live.... Do you believe this?"' (John 11:25-26). Well, do you?

Only God-the One through whom "all things were made" (1:3, cf. v. 10), in whom "was life" and "light" (v. 4)-can reverse creation's death and dissipate the darkness caused by sin. 2. But since that death and darkness are within creation, within man, the Word must become flesh in order to restore it from within. The Creator must enter His own creation, groaning as it is under the burden of alienation from Him.

It is an inexpressible grief,” Warfield wrote, to see the church “spending its energies in a vain attempt to lower its testimony to suit the ever changing sentiment of the world around it.

Asombrarse de la gracia de Dios es un signo de vitalidad espiritual. Es una prueba de fuego de cuán firme y real es nuestra comprensión del evangelio cristiano y cuán cerca caminamos de Jesucristo. El cristiano en crecimiento descubre que la gracia de Dios asombra y sorprende.

Faithful service is often unnoticed by men but it never remains unnoticed by God.

An individual may have quite strong faith, much grace, and rich evidence of fruitful service yet lack full assurance because of natural temperament. We are, after all, physico-psychical unities. A melancholic disposition de facto creates obstacles to the enjoyment of assurance—partly because it creates obstacles to the enjoyment of everything. In this context, it is significant that the exhortation of the author of Hebrews to approach God in full assurance of faith (Heb. 10:22) is ultimately based on his exposition of the humanity of Christ as a merciful and sympathetic high priest, who has taken our frail flesh in a fallen world, shared our infirmities, experienced our temptations, and known what it is to pray with loud crying and tears.25 Those who are of a melancholic spirit and are prone to doubt need to have their minds steeped in the assurances of divine grace that are to be found in such a Savior fully clothed in the garments of his gospel. Such believers often feel Christ to be distant, so what Hebrews does is bring him near.26 The one whose penultimate recorded words in the frailty of pre-resurrection humanity began with an interrogative “My God, why?” is the God who is near enough to those who feel themselves distant from him to bring them into assurance of his grace.

done

Church history helps to illuminate and clarify what we believe, providing a context for evaluating our beliefs and practices, according to the teaching of the church of all the ages.

Our faith and works are merely reflections of the salvation we have received, not a contributing factor to it.

But the truth is that while they may be more dramatic, ours are no less supernatural, for the same Lord sovereignly designed the events that also led us to faith. It was he who placed us in a Christian family, or brought us into contact with a Christian, or stirred up in us an unaccountable desire to read

the Bible. He created in us a sense that there was something wrong or missing. And so, by various means, he brought us to the Bible’s message and to faith in Christ. The important thing is not how spectacular God’s work is but how effective it has been. All that matters is that we have come to Christ, and have found in him what we were looking for, even if we did not at first know what that really was. And that is a reason to be profoundly thankful. It is an amazing thought that thousands of people may be reading this book during Advent, and even reading this very page today. Perhaps one of them is experiencing what these wise men experienced: a searching for something that seems to be missing, the feeling that something is not quite right, or a new and unfamiliar sense of their sinfulness. Perhaps, already, they have started on a spiritual journey that has taken some twists and turns. But now it is becoming clear that what they need more than anything else is the Saviour, the King, Jesus. Perhaps you are that person. Have you found him yet?

Isaiah had written that this “child” would bring about a great deliverance “as on the day of Midian” (Isaiah 9:4). He was referring to the “Battle of Midian,” when, guided by God, Gideon had reduced his army in stages from 32,000 down to 300 men carrying 300 trumpets and 300 jars with torches inside them. They surrounded the Midianite camp by night, and then, on the signal, they smashed the jars—letting the light shine out—blew the trumpets, and shouted in triumph; the Midian army fled in disarray (Judges 7:1-25). Truly “the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25). Perhaps Paul was thinking about this incident when he wrote about the light of the gospel shining in the darkness in the face of Jesus Christ, and he added, “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). For this child—“little, weak and helpless,” as one carol puts it[7]—was nevertheless “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). Truly, “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (v 25).

God sees as clearly in the dark as in the day; he knows what he is doing and where he is going. He can even weave the dark threads of man’s evil deeds, tragedies, and disasters into his purposes and use them for his glory.

Here, then, is a fundamental principle of Bible study: we reflect first on what the words communicated to those who heard them; then we work out, with the help of the Spirit, how they apply to us.

Sus obras, todas son señales de ello. Estamos lejos de ser intelectual o personalmente objetivos, o indiferentes, sobre Dios. Debajo de todo, nos oponemos a Él de forma emocional e intelectual; si no fuera así, ¿por qué tanto resentimiento?

Christian liberty does not mean that you welcome fellow Christians only when you have sorted out their views on X or Y (or with a view to doing that).

I don’t know if I’ve written about this and I haven’t talked about this much, so in a way what I’m about to say is self-condemnatory, but I think it is one of the greatest tragedies of the American evangelical church—and I think in large measure the British evangelical church—that in our focus on how to get saved, we completely lost the sense of what it meant not to be saved, but to be created. And so many Christians grew up with very little appreciation of the idea that we are made as the image of God. And so long as that was true, I think—and I’m not saying it was inevitable—but I think that made it far more likely that the law of God would be detached from the person of God. And then in understanding the whole of Scripture, the imperatives of the gospel would be detached from the indicatives of the gospel. The truest Reformed faith did not see the teaching of Scripture in the somewhat narrower spectrum of—for example, Martin Luther, or that stage of the reformation. Luther says things are either law or they’re gospel... But it seems to me that in the best Reformed tradition, the story of the Bible is not law and gospel; the story of the Bible is actually—the way I would put it, and I could demonstrate this from the literature—is the grace of creation as the image of God. Now, we use the word grace and we’ve almost defined it in terms of sin. The Reformed fathers didn’t define it in terms of sin. They defined it in terms of God—his graciousness—so that creation is an act of condescension—his relationship with Adam and Eve, making them as his image. We are non-existence that he brings into existence, and he didn’t need to bring them into existence... The creation of man and woman as the image of God and all that that means is an act of infinite grace. It’s nothingness being brought into creation to be a miniature likeness of God. And so the whole story is one of graciousness and promise implied in the statements that are made—now, that’s another long story. And therefore, in order that the man and the woman would grow and would grow in fulfilling their commission to, as I say, garden the whole earth. They’re given this little garden and they’re to extend it to the end of the earth, which for all I know, might have taken millennia of their family, but probably speedier development of technology than there has actually been. All of this sets our existence within the context of the person of God, the generosity of God, the integrity of God. But then comes the fall. The restoration, therefore... is always a means of answering the question, How does God restore us to what we were originally created to be and then take us on to what we were ultimately destined to be?

This might be illustrated by the way in which, for example, John Owen’s work Of the Mortification of Sin has undoubtedly been read by many more younger ministers than either his Glory of Christ or Communion with God. That may be understandable because of the deep pastoral insight in Owen’s short work; but it may also put the practical cart before the theological horse. Owen himself would not have been satisfied with hearers who learned mortification without learning Christ. A larger paradigmatic shift needs to take place than only exchanging a superficial subjectivism for Owen’s rigorous subjectivism. What is required is a radical recentering in a richer and deeper knowledge of Christ, understood in terms of his person and work. There can be little doubt that Owen himself viewed things this way.

Thus it is understanding God’s grace—that is to say, understanding God himself 178—that demolishes legalism. Grace highlights legalism’s bankruptcy and shows that it is not only useless; it is pointless; its life breath is smothered out of it.

Far more important, it is only through such empowering that we will get beyond witnessing to fellow Christians about the Reformed faith and start witnessing to non-Christians about saving faith.

His work is the real thing. It preserves us from two dangers. The first is the (Arminian) danger of false revivalism. Familiarity with the genuine is the best safeguard against the false. The second is the (Reformed?) danger of a false superiority.

We are, after all, learning to think God’s thoughts after Him—about Himself, about the world, about others, about ourselves. God’s Word is not a comfort blanket. It is the sword of the Spirit; indeed, it is sharper than any two-edged sword (Heb. 4:12).

Some Christians today may be tempted to focus on their theological shortcomings, especially Boniface’s devotion to the pope as his spiritual leader. Doubtless, as Christians of their time, they had their inconsistencies. But how inconsistent of us if we sit in judgment on what we regard as their failures, yet also sit in silence and comfort rather than speak the gospel and go to the ends of the earth to tell others about Christ as they did. These men illustrate two of the characteristics Christ looks for in contemporary Christians: to stand for Christ in a pagan environment—whatever it costs—like Boniface, and the willingness to go wherever God sends us, like A-lo-pen.

Am I, perhaps, the kind of Christian who is quick to be caught up in a controversy (which may indeed have its place) while ignoring the call to world evangelism? Then let me remember Boniface, the Sigan-Fu Stone, and most of all, let me remember Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead that He might be my Lord.

There are few things more destructive to the Christian church as a whole or to any congregation, large or small, than an individual who “loveth to have the preeminence” (3 John 9, KJV). And yet, as we have seen before, God never leaves Himself without a testimony to the saving and transforming power of the gospel.

Faithfulness is far more significant than fame when Jesus is building His church.

Hebrews is instructive again in this context. Its summons to draw near in full assurance of faith is coupled with the exhortation not to neglect worship and fellowship.37 The ministry of God’s Word; the mutual instruction believers give one another through singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; the encouragement believers give each other as they stir one another up to love and good works—all these are, as divine ordinances, ways of promoting in us an increase of assurance that we really are Christ’s, since we love him, we love his Word, and we love his people. The neglect of them correspondingly tends to hinder and diminish assurance.

In the coming of the Lord Jesus, God has kept his promise to bless the nations through Abraham’s seed (Genesis 12:1-3). Therefore, we can trust him to keep his promises to us too—promises to work for our good, to be with us by his Spirit, and to bring us home to be with him in glory for ever. For “all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory” (2 Corinthians 1:20).

Repentance ... is the true turning of our life to God, a turning that arises from a pure and earnest fear of him; and it consists in the mortification of our flesh and of the old man, and in the vivification of the Spirit.1

Isaiah saw that this child would be everything we lack. For our confusion, he is the “Wonderful Counsellor”; for our weakness, he is the “Mighty God”; for spiritual orphans and prodigal sons, he is the “Everlasting Father”; in our distress, he comes to us as the “Prince of Peace.

We sometimes ask, “What’s in a name?” In the case of this name, Jesus, the Christian’s answer is “Everything”. Because “Jesus” is not only a name; it is who he is.

We can’t help admiring Joseph. He heard the word of God; he believed the word of God; and he obeyed the word of God, whatever the cost might be.