“Faith makes a man to cast away not only his sins, but his own righteousness too, to exalt the righteousness of Christ. It makes a man’s best duties, best works, and highest measures of inherent grace to be, in comparison to Christ’s obedience and righteousness, but as stars to the sun, which disappear when the sun rises.”
-Obadiah Grew, from is “The Lord Our Righteousness”, P.76-77
“The holiness of God consists in His mind and will being in perfect accordance with truth and righteousness. And to become “partakers of His holiness”, is just to have the mind brought to His mind, the will brought to His will: to think as He thinks- to will as He wills – to find enjoyment in that which He finds enjoyment. This is man’s profit. This is the perfection of his nature, both as to holiness and happiness.”
-John Brown, from his Hebrews commentary, P.628.
“Modern Protestantism- priceless as have been the benefits it has conferred on those who have joined its ranks – is yet very far from being a perfect recovery of primitive Christianity. It has risen out of the gross ignorance and superstition of medieval Romanism…it has recovered a purer faith and a simpler ritual…and has adopted as its motto, “The Bible, the whole Bible and nothing but the Bible”…but it has never completely purified itself from Romish doctrine and practice…and it has developed two strong tendencies, one to a return to the Romish apostacy, and the other to rationalism and infidelity. The true spiritual church of Christ is still, even in Protestant lands, but a small part of the professing church.”
H.G. Guinness, from his Romanism and the Reformation, P.168 – written in 1887
“Though Satan, then, is the god of this world, yet God is glorified in all the evil that Satan has introduced. In every part of Scripture, Jehovah is seen to be glorified: in His judgments as well as in His grace, in His wrath as well as in His mercy, in those who are lost as well as in those who are saved. However disagreeable this may be to the mind of the natural man, it is truly reasonable. Can there be a higher end than the glory of the Divine character?
Ibid, P.552
“The transformation or change that passes on the man who becomes a believer of the Gospel, is not one produced by enthusiastical imaginations, monkish austerity, or a spirit of legalism, endeavoring to attain salvation by good works. It is produced by the renewing of the mind, and by that only.
Ibid. P.557
“All injuctions that proceed merely from men in divine things are unacceptable to God. He approves of nothing but obedience to His own commands. All the injunctions, then, that men submit to, in obedience to the mandates of the church of Rome, are unacceptable to God. They are abomination in His sight. The will of God as exhibited in His word is perfect. Nothing can be added to it, nothing can be taken from it; yet that monstrous system of Antichristianity which has so long, in the name of Christ, lorded it over the world has added innumerable commands to those of Christ, and even taken away many of His laws.”
-Robert Haldane, Romans commentary, P.557
“True religion, in all its forms, has been spiritual in its nature, and humbling in its tendency; and false religions, in all their varieties, have been possessed of directly the opposite qualities. The leading principles of true religion are “God is all and in all”; man, as a creature “is as nothing; and less than nothing, and vanity”.
-John Brown, From his Galatians commentary, P.264
“Nothing riles the natural man more and brings to the surface his innate, inveterate enmity against God than to press upon him the eternality, the freeness, and the absolute sovereignty of divine grace”.
-A.W.Pink, from his The Nature of God,P .81
“In proportion as the work of sanctification advances, remaining depravity, though weakened, will exert itself the more violently and vex the believer the more keenly; nay, in some cases, it prevails against him the more frequently. The struggle will become more vehement and more harassing, but grace will finally overcome. Spiritual death will be swallowed up in victory.”
John Colquhoun, from his Sermons on Important Doctrines, P.198
“The reconciliation God has accomplished, and, in the accomplishment, both law and love have triumphed. The one has not given way to the other. Each has kept its ground. Each has come from the conflict honored and glorifed.”
-Horatius Bonar, From his The Everlasting Righteousness, P.18
“Every sin is, in its own nature, a denial of God to be the chiefest good and happiness, and implies that it is no great matter to lose Him: it is a forsaking Him as the Fountain of Life, and a preferring a cracked and “empty cistern” as the chief happiness before Him (Jer.2:13)”.
-Stephen Charnock, Ibid, P.314. vol. 2
“Nothing is so weak, but His strength can make victorious; nothing so small, but by His power He can accomplish His great ends by it; nothing so vile, but His might can conduct to His glory; and no nation so mighty, but He can waste and enfeeble by the meanest creatures. God is great in power in the greatest things, and not little in the smallest; His power in the minutest creatures which He uses for His service, surmounts the force of our understanding.”
-Stephen Charnock, Ibid, P.59, vol 2
“We fell from God by an unbelief of the threatening; He recovers us by a belief of the promise; by unbelief we laid the foundation of God’s dishonor; by faith, therefore, God exalts the glory of His free grace. We lost ourselves by a desire of self-dependence, and our return is ordered by way of self-emptiness…we sinned by a refusal of cleaving to God; it is part of Divine wisdom to restore us in a denial of our own righteousness and strength. Men having sinned by pride, the wisdom of God humbles us at the very root of the tree of knowledge, and makes him deny his own understanding, and submit to faith, or else, forever to lose his desired felicity”.
Stephen Charnock, From his The Existence and Attributes of God, P.572, vol 1
REFORMED TREASURES 