For the Lord's Day September 11, 2011

Question 1. What is your only comfort in life and death?

Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him. ~ From the Heidelberg Catechism, 1563

For the Lord's Day

How to avoid a wasted life: “God created me – and you – to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion – namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life. Enjoying and displaying are both crucial. If we try to display the excellence of God without joy in it, we will display a shell of hypocrisy and create scorn or legalism. But if we claim to enjoy his excellence and do not display it for others to see and admire, we deceive ourselves, because the mark of God-enthralled joy is to overflow and expand by extending itself into the hearts of others. The wasted life is the life without a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.   -- Don’t Waste Your Life, John Piper

For the Lord's Day

“Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, not matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in Christian behavior may be. It is always in His “blood and righteousness” alone that we can rest. There is never anything that we are or have or do that can take His place, or that can take place along with him. We are always unworthy, and all that we have or do of good is always of pure grace.” - - B. B. Warfield, Works, vol 7, p. 113

For the Lord's Day

“Grace makes sense to us only in light of the sin to which it provides the remedy. Consequently, the more sensitive we are to sin, misery and danger, the more clearly we will grasp the wonder of God’s salvation. Grace is only ‘amazing’ when we see that it is ‘a wretch like me’ it saves. Only sinners seek Jesus as a Savior!” ~ Dr. Sinclair Ferguson in Puritans – Ministers of the World

For the Lord's Day

“The Trinity puts personhood at the very center of existence, originating with God. God is not a solitary being, eternally lonely until he creates us. God is independent and does not need us, because He is both one and three… This Trinitarian God establishes my sense of personal identity within reality. The distinction between the creature and the Creator reflects the very nature of God, in which divine distinctions are made within organic personal unity.”   ~ Peter Jones in One or Two: Seeing a World of Difference

For the Lord's Day - Communion Sunday

“The Lord’s Supper is not for all indiscriminately as the gospel is. The Lord’s Supper is chiefly commemoration and communion. It is for those who discern the Lord’s body, who can commemorate his death in faith and love. And since the supper is also Communion it is obviously for those who commune with Christ and with one another in the unity of the body which is the church…. It is part of the whole counsel of God that those conditions be clearly and insistently set forth, to the end that those who are eligible partake and those who are not refrain.”    -- John Murray, Collected Writings