“People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, and obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”
“Regeneration, which Richard Lovelace calls “the beachhead of sanctification in the soul,” is God’s mysterious work of imparting new life to the soul.”
“Moral reformations can take place apart from Christ. History proves that. Mortal resurrections, on the other hand, require the Gospel. It requires Christ alone to come and do for us what we could never do for ourselves.”
“Faith is believing in and relying upon God. It is “not a work, but a relinquishment of all work, an unqualified trust in God who gives life to the dead (Rom. 4:17), who raised Christ from the dead (4:24), who in Christ gave ‘a righteousness from God.’”
“Bubbles please boys, but men prize those things which are solid and substantial, with a foundation and a bottom to them which will bear the test of ages.”
-CH Spurgeon
“For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.”
–The Pursuit of God by AW Tozer (location 85 Kindle Edition)
It was better that Jesus departed. The Spirit of Jesus now indwells the hearts of believers.
“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7 ESV)
"Not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard"
The Gospel Centered Life 