worldliness

Being dead to the world means that every legitimate pleasure in the world becomes a blood-bought evidence of Christ's love and an occasion of boasting in the cross. When our hearts run back along the beam of blessing to the source in the cross, then the worldliness of the blessing is dead, and Christ crucified is everything.

John Piper, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die, p83

Luther on the Treasure of the Church

The true treasure of the church is the Holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God.

Martin Luther, 95 Theses (no. 62)

Authentic church life

To put it candidly, you will never have an authentic experience of the body of Christ unless your foundation is blindly and singularly Jesus Christ. Authentic church life is born when a group of people are intoxicated with a glorious unveiling of their Lord.The chief task of a Christian leader, therefore, is to present a Christ to God’s people that they have never known, dreamed, or imagined. A breathtaking Christ whom they can know intimately and love passionately. The calling of every Christian servant is to build the ekklesia upon an overmastering revelation of the Son of God. A revelation that burns in the fiber of their being and leaves God’s people breathless, overwhelmed, and awash in the glories of Jesus.

Viola "From Eternity to Here"

Pearse on Maturity

But if there's one thing all that psychology could have taught us, it's that the self-directed person remains, in most respects, an infant. Growing up consists in becoming other-centred. That is why Jesus was the most grown-up person who ever lived.

Meic Pearse, cited by Tim Chester in The Ordinary Hero, p84

Carson on Waiting for the Second Coming

It is one thing to wait for the Lord's coming; it is another thing to wait well. One may honestly and self-consciously wait for the Lord's coming, not only acknowledging that the Second Advent is a necessary part of our creed but even after a fashion looking forward to the Parousia, and hoping it will occur in our lifetime - only to find, on reflection, that the way we live has been affected very little by this perspective. In fact, this waiting for the return of the Lord may be nothing more than a hobbyhorse in our reading or teaching, a well-handled map of the future that divides us from other believers, rather than a fixed point in our worldview that decisively shapes how we conduct ourselves.

Don Carson in For the Love of God, vol. 1, Meditation for November 23.

Sibbes on Power over Sin as well as Pardon for Sin

Some weak notions would place all the change in justification. They separate Christ's offices, as if he were all priest but not a governing king; or as if he were righteousness but not sanctification; or as if he had merit to die for us and to give us his righteousness, but no efficacy to change our natures; or as if in the covenant of grace God only forgave our sins but did not write his law in our hearts. But in the covenant of grace he does both. Where God makes a combination, we must not break it. Efficacy and merit, justification and sanctification, water and blood, go together. There must be a change.

Richard Sibbes in Glorious Freedom, p104

Piper on the Deadliness of Television

It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ...

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it.

John Piper in article, Why I Don't Have a Television and Rarely Go to Movies, http://tinyurl.com/n54qrh