Charismatic

Paul was both a Calvinist and regularly healed the sick and prophesied renders this a moot point. Even the committed cessationist who acknowledges that Paul embraced a Calvinistic soteriology will have to concede that, at least in the first century, the two perspectives were entirely harmonious.

Sam Storms, Convergence, p.23

Fear of the Lord

The fear of the Lord simplifies life....It is as if the book of Daniel is the fear of the Lord's Hall of Fame.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.228

God: All-Just and All-Merciful

I greatly longed to understand Paul's Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in my way but that one expression, "the justice of God," because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in consceince, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Yet I clung to dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant.
Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that "the just shall live by his faith." The I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise... This is to behold God in faith, that you should look upon his fatherly, friendly heart, in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness. He who sees God as angry does not see him rightly but looks only on a curtain, as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face.

Martin Luther, Here I Stand: A Life Of Martin Luther, p.30

Community

The problem is that unless there is a radical change in the way we see God, ourselves, and others, community will become just another strategy for us to feel better about ourselves.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.217

Fear of the Lord

When we live in the fear of the Lord, there is an intensity to our lives. We are zealous to obey, we are no longer indifferent to others, and we have a desire for the church to be brilliant and outstanding.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.214

Love Shown

We love enemies by surprising them with our service toward them. We love neighbors by treating them like our family. And we love the body of Christ - our true brothers and sisters - in such a way that the world and spiritual powers are stunned by our oneness.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.211

Biblical Love

Biblical love is never satisfied unless it is growing (1 Peter 1:22).

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.210

Lord's Supper

When you are told to examine yourself before the Lord's Supper, what do you think about? Most likely you remember a list of recent private sins.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.206

Spiritual Gifts

...the purpose of spiritual gifts is to bring unity to the church.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.204

The Church

Paul's vision of the church is that it would be God's greatest statement to both the world and the heavenly beings.
... To bring us to unity, God has given gifts to the body. The gifts are other people.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.203

Unity

...one of the great blessings on earth is to be united with God's People rather than to fear them or be isolated from them.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.202

Psalms

The Psalms are for private meditation and for the assembly, but they are most comfortable in the assembly.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.201

Body of Christ

You must believe that those in the body of Christ are your family. Learn that we are a people just as much as we are individual persons.
...The Bible is clear that each individual is responsible for his or her own sin, but there is a sense in which the whole body is polluted when there is sin in one of the members.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.198 & 200

Community

When people were converted int he book of Acts, it was assumed that they would be part of a local fellowship. It could have been no other way. They had been ushered into a community of the resurrection, a community of the Spirit.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.196

Sanctification

Learn through incessant repetition, practice, and prayer. Sanctification is like a clumsy, slow walk rather than a light switch that we turn from off to on.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.192

Power & Discernment

God says that you treat enemies the same way you treat friends and family.
...To love in this way, we need both power and discernment. We need power because we are incapable of loving the way Christ has loved us. We need discernment because it is sometimes difficult to know what form love should take.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.179

Reading the Psalms

Reach each psalm at least twice. The first time we can allow it to speak for us. The second time we listen to it as the voice of Jesus.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.188

Eternal Wedding Ceremony

In traditional Western weddings, the bride is the honored one. At the heavenly eternal ceremony, however, our gaze will be fixed on another. The bride, indeed, will be exalted, honored, and glorified, but her beauty will exalt the triune God even more. It was he who pursued, wooed, bought, and transformed her. Any beauty in the bride is a reflection of the greater beauty of the bridegroom.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.178

Knowledge of God

When we are lost in sin, without clear spiritual reference points, we misinterpret and distort that knowledge. We think it safer and more effective to look to other people to relieve our emptiness.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.172

Our Needs

... many of our needs are more accurately called lusts, and the objects of these needs are called idols.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.169

Contemplation

"No man can take a survey of himself but he must immediately turn to the contemplation of God in whom he lives and moves."

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.169

Holiness

We are offspring who aspire to be like our Father. So we watch the Father in action. We imitate his holiness.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.167

Priestly Garments

The ephod was a beautiful piece of cloth that bore the names of the twelve tribes. It reminds us that we do not stand alone before the Lord, but we are in solidarity with other Christians.
The breastplate was also a skillfully crafted garment used to make godly decisions. It reminds us that all our decisions are done by consulting God's Word.
The turban, covered the head. It reminds us of our need for God's thorough covering. The engraved seal across the turban summarized the entire garment. It said, "HOLY TO THE LORD" (Ex. 28:36).
The priest belonged to God, represented God, was to be holy as God is holy, and lived to glorify God.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.160

God's Glory

This means that the essence of imaging God is to rejoice in God's presence, to love him above all else, and to live for his glory, not our own. The most basic question of human existence becomes "How can I bring glory to God?"

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.158

People Were Big & God Was Small

Now I understand what held me in the fear of man, even though I knew the gospel well. Not only did I need to grow in the fear of the Lord; I also needed to repent. My felt needs, desires, or lusts were big. They were so big that I looked to everybody to fill them, both God and other people. I feared other people because people were big, my desires were even bigger, and God was small.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.151

Desire Love

The problem is not that we desire love, the problem is how much we desire it or for what purpose we desire it.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.148-149

God Loves Us

god loves us because of his own sovereign pleasure and for the sake of his own glory. His glory is even greater when we realize that he didn't need to love us.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.145

What We Really Need

When you spend time in the throne room of God, it puts things in perspective. The opinions of others are less important, and even our opinions of ourselves seem less important. May that is all we need.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.135

Fear the Lord

Lord, teach your church to fear you. Your grace is not always amazing to us. We are slow to hate our sin. We are more concerned with what someone thinks about our appearance than we are about reverential obedience before you. We want to delight in fear. We want to treasure it and give it to the next generation. Amen

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.133

God's Riches

It is one thing to release a person from prison, but it is something else to deluge that same person with all the riches imaginable. But that is what our God has done.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.127

Fear of the Lord

If you have ever walked among giant redwoods, you will never be overwhelmed by the size of a dogwood tree. Or if you have been through a hurricane, a spring rain is nothing to fear. If you have been int he presence of the almighty God, everything that once controlled you suddenly has less power.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.119

Willing Submission

Then Isaiah did what anybody would do in such a situation. He forgot about himself and offered himself as a servant to the living God. His fear of the Lord was expressed by reverential obedience. This is one of the great blessings of the fear of the Lord. We think less often about ourselves.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.119

Fear of the Lord

If you want to know whether or not you fear God, note your reaction when good things are taken from you. How do you react to financial loss, the death of family member, the loss of love?

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.114

God's Law

The law is wonderful in that it reveals that holy character of God. The Ten Commandments and their many applications teach about the Lawgiver. They reveal that God's ways are profoundly higher than the ways of the surrounding nations.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.110

God's Creation

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book VII

Holiness

Holiness is not one of the many attributes of God. It is his essential nature and seen in all his qualities.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.98

Psychological Needs

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for a feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1978), 7.

Christian Psychology

[There is a] God-given need to be loved that is born into every human infant. It is a legitimate need that must be met from cradle to grave. If children are deprived of love - if that primal need for love is not meet - they carry the scars for life.

Rovert Hemfelt, Frank Minirth, and Paul Meier, Love Is A Choice (Nashville Nelson, 1989), 34

Religious Feelings

Even in worship services, the goal for many is that people feel something. Schleiermacher, a German theologian of the 1800's, made this the essence of religion. Theology for him was nothing more than religious feelings made articulate. "Religion." he said, "is a feeling of absolute dependence."

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.82

Feelings

Feelings have become the inarticulate mutterings of the Divine soul; to be morally upright is to do whatever your heart inspires you to do.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.81

Assumptions About God

Divine as the life of Jesus is , what an outrage to represent it as tantamount to the Universe! to seize one accidental good man that happened to exist somewhere at some time and say to the newborn soul, "Behold thy pattern ...go into the harness of that past individual, assume his manners, speak his speech," -this is the madness of Christendom .... I turn my back on these usurpers. The soul always believes in itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.77-78

Fear of People

...we are fighting not only our own hearts but the trends in our culture.
A new worldview arose that placed much more value on individual growth, personal identity, and the immense possibilities of the person without linking it to a submission of divine authority. It was the rise of Western culture as we know it today, the rise of the cult of self.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.75-76

Fear of Man

"Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell." Matthew 10:28

Victimization

The Christian view of victimization is consistently God-centered, and this has been the goal in counseling Janet. Biblical guidance starts with hearing about God's great compassion. It proceeds to examine our own hearts so that we can grow in obedience to Christ, and it ends with trusting that our god is the almighty God who is just and loving.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.70

Biblical Counsel

All counsel given Janet must be filled with compassion for her and anger over the injustices she suffered. Otherwise, it is not biblical counsel.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.69

Fear of People

Only persistent meditation on the cross of Christ is sufficient to allay this fear.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.68

Shame

Such thinking is based on the unbiblical assumption that our works can either keep us away from God or move us toward him. It is a denial of grace itself. It suggests that there is some righteous act she must perform in order to meet God halfway. This, however, has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus. The gospel is only available to people who know they are unclean.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.68

Shame

God extends his compassion and his mighty, rescuing arm to take away shame. Jesus both experienced shame and took our shame on himself, so shame no longer defines us. In fact, by grace through faith, it is no longer part of us.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.67

Fear of Man

The fear of man is the sinful exaggeration of a normal experience.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.59

Fears

In the biblical sense, what we fear shows our allegiances. It shows where we put our trust.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.47

Idols

What is the result of this people idolatry? ... the idol we choose to worship soon owns us.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.46

Avoid God

... holiness left them feeling vulnerable and exposed. They became aware of their own shame. To deal with this holy terror, their rebellious hearts searched for a god that was tame.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.43

Idol

They wanted a god they could control and manipulate. They wanted nothing above themselves, including God.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.45

Fear of Man

Fear of man is always part of a triad that includes unbelief and disobedience.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.43

Fear of Man

Paul was not a people-pleaser. He was a people-lover, and because of that he did not change his message according to what others might think. Only people-lovers are able to confront. Only people-lovers are not controlled by other people. Paul even indicated to the Galatians that if he were still trying to please men, he would not be a servant of God (Gal. 1:10). That is how seriously he took the fear of man.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.41

Fear of Man

"... You aren't swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are." Matthew 22:16

Fear of People

We are more concerned about looking stupid (a fear of people) than we are about acting sinfully (fear of the Lord).

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.40

Fear of People

One way to avoid God's eyes is to live as if fear of other people is our deepest problem - they are big , not God. Fear of people is often a more conscious version of being afraid of God.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.33

Masks

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has thrown off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; I have seen men who played hide and seek so long that at last in madness they disgustingly obtruded upon others their secret thoughts which hitherto they had proudly concealed.

Soren Kierkegaard, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.32-33

Self-Esteem

That's the paradox of self-esteem" Low self-esteem usually means that I think too highly of myself. I'm too self-involved, I feel I deserve better than what I have. The reason I feel bad about myself is that I aspire to something more. I want just a few minutes of greatness. I am a peasant who wants to be king. When you are in the grips of low self-esteem, it's painful, and it certainly doesn't feel like pride. But I believe that this is the dark, quieter side of pride - thwarted pride.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are big and God Is Small, p.32

Self-Esteem

The problem is that we really are not okay. There is no reason why we should feel great about ourselves. We truly are deficient.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.29

Shame

At the moment of Adam's sin, shame - that is, "What will they think of me?" and "What will God think of me?" - became a cornerstone of human experience.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p. 25

Fear of Man

...other people became a threat because they too could see it. Their perceived opinions could now dominate our lives. The story of Scripture looked to hide and protect themselves from the gazes of God and other people.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.24

We Fear People

Three basic reasons why we fear other people:
1- We fear people because they can expose and humiliate us.
2- We fear people because they can reject, ridicule, or despise us.
3- We fear people because they can attack, oppress, or threaten us.

These three reasons have one thing in common: they see people as "bigger" then God.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.23

Fear of Man

Fear of man summarized: We replace God with people. Instead of a biblically guided fear of the Lord, we fear others.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.14

Fear of Man

"Fear" in the biblical sense is a much broader word. It includes being afraid of someone, but it extends to holding someone in awe, being controlled or mastered by people, worshiping other people, putting your trust in people, or needing people.

Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small, p.14

Religion

“What a hopeful sign it would be even if people were excited against religion! Really, I would sooner that they intelligently hated it than that they were stolidly indifferent to it. A man who has enough thought about him to oppose the Truth of God is a more hopeful subject than the man who does not think at all.”

Spurgeon

Fitting in the good things

“They [the puritans] lived by ‘method’ (we would say, by a rule of life), planning and proportioning their time with care, not so much to keep bad things out as to make sure that they got all good and important things in.”

- J. I. Packer in A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life.

How to Grow in Godliness

"If thou meanest to enlarge thy religion, do it rather by enlarging thy ordinary devotions, rather than thy extraordinary devotions." - John Owen