Wrath of God/Love of God

“Some find a difficulty in that they see wrath as incompatible with the fact that ‘God is love’. They are so sure of the love of God that they say that there can be no such thing as the wrath of God. But this is faulty reasoning. The opposite of love is not wrath. It is hate. We can say that, if God is a God of love, he will not hate those that he has made, but we cannot say that he will never be angry with them. Indeed, the opposite may well be the case. The more he loves the more he will be angry with everything that mars the perfection of the beloved, that is with every sin. God’s wrath is identical with God’s love. God’s wrath is God’s love blazing out in fiery indignation against every evil in the beloved.”

- Leon Morris, The Atonement (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1983), 174.

Prayer

"Prayer is not made so that God can find out what we need, because Jesus tells us, "Your Father knows what you need before you ask him" (Matt 6:8). God wants us to pray because prayer expresses our trust in God and is a means whereby our trust in him can increase. In fact, perhaps the primary emphasis of the Bible's teaching on prayer is that we are to pray with faith, which means trust or dependence on God. God as our Creator delights in being trusted by us as his creatures, for an attitude of dependence is most appropriate to the Creator/Creature relationship. Praying in humble dependence also indicates that we are genuinely convinced of God's wisdom, love, goodness, and power--indeed of all of the attributes that make up his excellent character. When we truly pray, we as persons, in the wholeness of our character, are relating to God as a person, in the wholeness of his character. Thus, all that we think or feel about God comes to expression in our prayer. It is only natural that God would delight in such activity and place much emphasis on it in his relationship with us." --Wayne Grudem.

Believe

"It is easy to believe in God, but far more difficult to believe God." 
RC Sproul

The Motivation of Theological Appreciation Appropriated in Worship

In other words, he has written to them in this particular way because he is aware that, ultimately, the profundity of their theological appreciation, appropriated in worship, will be far more effective in helping them to be what they were meant to be than merely piling moral exhortation upon moral exhortation.

- A.T. Lincoln commenting on how Paul sought to motivate the Ephesian church.

Society preserved, disturbed and invaded

“It is too easy to divorce the rule of Christ in heaven from the life of his church on earth; to so abstract the one from the other that the effective outworking of Christ’s sovereignty is left to mysterious forces quite unconnected with our everyday Christian life. In this way we can make the reign of Christ something too remote; invisible, inaudible and eventually undetectable. Whereas it is through the Church’s presence and power, by her work and witness, that society itself is preserved, disturbed and invaded by this reigning Lord.”

- Peter Lewis

Its not about us

The Bible is God’s book, it is a revelation of God, and our thinking must always start with God. Much of the trouble in the Church today is due to the fact that we are so subjective, so interested in ourselves, so egocentric. That is the peculiar error of this present century. Having forgotten God, and having become so interested in ourselves, we become miserable and wretched, and spend our time in ’shallows and in miseries.’

The message of the Bible from beginning to end is designed to bring us back to God, to humble us before God, and to enable us to see our true relationship to Him. And that is the great theme of this Epistle [Ephesians]… We must not start by examining ourselves and our needs microscopically; we must start with God, and forget ourselves. In this Epistle we are taken as it were by the hand by the Apostle and are told that we are going to be given a view of the glory and the majesty of God.

- D. M. Lloyd‐Jones, God’s Ultimate Purpose: An Exposition of Ephesians 1:1 to 23 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 13.

Preacher

“The Christian preacher has a boundary set for him. When he enters the pulpit, he is not an entirely free man. There is a very real sense in which it may be said of him that the Almighty has set him his bounds that he shall not pass. He is not at liberty to invent or choose his message: it has been committed to him, and it is for him to declare, expound, and commend it to his hearers . . . It is a great thing to come under the magnificent tyranny of the Gospel!”

Donald Coggan, quoted in Stott, 126-27