Sermon quotes on election
John Knox
It is not birth only, nor propinquity of blood, that makes a king lawfully to reign above a people professing Christ Jesus and his eternal verity; but in his election must the ordinance, which God has established in the election of inferior judges, be observed.
Peter Kreeft
God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything. … There is not predestination but destination, not predestiny but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity.
Richard Mouw
Imagine a president who was elected who spent all his time talking about his election…he ordered studies on how he was elected…people wouldn’t be happy…right, you are elected to do something…it’s the same thing with our own election.
Lesslie Newbigin
Through the repeated hammer blows of defeat, destruction, and deportation, interpreted by the faithful prophets, Israel has to learn that election is not for comfort and security but for suffering and humiliation.
Charles Spurgeon
I believe the doctrine of election, because I am quite certain that, if God had not chosen me, I should never have chosen Him; and I am sure He chose me before I was born, or else He never would have chosen me afterwards; and He must have elected me for reasons unknown to me, for I never could find any reason in myself why He should have looked upon me with special love.
Charles Spurgeon
Rebellion against divine election is often founded on the idea that the sinner has a sort of right to be saved, and this is to deny the full desert of sin.
Augustus Toplady
I infer that God’s decrees, and the necessity of event flowing thence, neither destroy the true free-agency of men, nor render the commission of sin a jot less heinous. They neither force the human will, nor extenuate the evil of human actions. Predestination, foreknowledge, and providence, only secure the event, and render it certainly future, in a way and manner (incomprehensibly indeed by us; but) perfectly consistent with the nature of second causes.
B. B. Warfield
The marvel of marvels is not that God, in His infinite love, has not elected all this guilty race to be saved, but that He has elected any.
Alan Roxburgh & M. Scott Boren
The mysterious choosing of the people of Israel forms the imaginative backdrop to the New Testament concept of election. The mystery of the election of the church is not, as in Augustine’s framing, about who has been selected by God to escape judgment and get in the lifeboat to heaven called church. It is not about which individuals were chosen and which were left out. Like the choosing of Israel in Abram, this choosing is not really about the those inside the church but about being chosen by God to represent him for the sake of the world.
Introducing the Missional Church
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