The Gospel and Obedience

“Believers obey Christ as the one by whom our obedience is accepted by God. Believers know all their duties are weak, imperfect and unable to abide in God’s presence. Therefore they look to Christ as the one who bears the iniquity of their holy things [acts], who adds incense to their prayers, gather out all the weeds from their duties and makes them acceptable to God.”

- John Owen

Best Preparation for the Study of the Gospel

“The best preparation for the study of [the gospel] is – neither great intellectual ability nor much scholastic learning-but a conscience impressed with a sense of our actual condition as sinners in the sight of God. A deep conviction of sin is the one thing needful in such an inquiry, - a conviction of the fact of sin, as an awful reality in our own personal experience – of the power of sin as an inveterate evil cleaving to us continually, and having its roots deep in the inner most recesses of our hearts, - and of the guilt of sin, which once committed, can never cease to be true of us and which [in itself] deserves his wrath and righteous condemnation.” (James Buchanan, The Doctrine of Justification pg 236-37)

Augustine and the Gospel

“And here lies the secret of his profound realization that Christian happiness consist in “comforted remorse”.

“Before him men were prone to conceive themselves essentially God's creatures, whose business it was to commend themselves to their Maker: no doubt they recognized that they had sinned, and that provisions had been made to relieve them of the penalty of their sins; but they built their real hope of acceptance in God's sight more of less upon their own conduct. Augustine realized to the bottom of his soul that he was a sinner and what it is to be a sinner, and therefore sought at God's hand not acceptance but salvation.”

“And this is reason why he never thought of God without thinking of sin and never thought of sin without thinking of Christ. Because he took his sin seriously, his thought and feeling alike traveled continually in this circle, and could not but travel in this circle. He thus was constantly verifying afresh the truth of the Savior's declaration that he to whom little is forgiven loves little, while he loves much who is conscious of having received much forgiveness … So he came to understand that the heights of joy are scaled only by him who has first been miserable, and that the highest happiness belongs only to him who has been the object of salvation. Self-despair, humble trust, grateful love, fullness of joy – these are steps on which his own soul climbed upward: and these steps gave their whole color and form both to his piety and to his teaching.”

- B.B. Warfield, Calvin and Augustine. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1980, p. 336-350

God's Obsession

“Do you not know... what God's estimate of the gospel is? Do you not know that it has been the chief subject of His thoughts and acts from all eternity? He looks on it as the grandest of all His works.” - Charles Spurgeon