The Necessity of Labor

"...it is a constant law of human nature that the more a man has to indulge in, the less disposed he is to endure the discipline of toil-that is to say, the less willing he is to produce that which is to be consumed. Labor ceases to be functional in life; it becomes something that is grudgingly traded for that competence, or that superfluity, which everyone has a 'right' to. A society spoiled in this manner may be compared to a drunkard: the more he imbibes the less he is able to work and acquire the means to indulge his habit. A great material establishment, by its very temptation to luxuriousness, unfits the owner for the labor necessary to maintain it, as has been observed countless times in the histories of individuals and of nations."

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, p. 15.

Why have we minimized preaching?

"I would not hesitate to put in the first position: the loss of belief in the authority of the Scriptures, and a diminution in the belief in the Truth. I put this first because I am sure it is the main factor. If you have not got authority, you cannot speak well, you cannot preach. Great preaching always depends upon great themes. Great themes always produce great speaking in any realm, and this is particularly true, of course, in the realm of the Church. While men believed in the Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God and spoke on the basis of that authority you had great preaching. But once that went, and men began to speculate, and to theorise, and to put up hypotheses and so on, the eloquence and greatness of the spoken word inevitably declined and began to wane. You cannot really deal with speculations and conjectures in the same way as preaching had formerly dealt with the great themes of the Scriptures. But as belief in the great doctrines of the Bible began to go out, and sermons were replaced by ethical addresses and homilies, and moral uplift and socio-political talk, it is not surprising that preaching declined."

D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, p. 13.

External Members of the Covenant

"So as with the other covenants, it is possible for someone to join the new covenant community externally without the new heart that defines that covenant. He may be baptized and profess Christian doctrine. But if he lives a life of sin, he shows that he does not have the new heart that is the mark of the new covenant. He has wrongly entered the covenant community and ought to be disciplined by the body. He has become a Christian externally, but without inward change."

John Frame, Systematic Theology, p. 81.

I would add that we should read "wrongly entered the covenant community" as "entered the covenant community deficiently" not that he shouldn't have entered the covenant community at all. Baptism welcomes us as legitimate members of the covenant community - but, in the case of an unconverted covenant member, his membership is belied by his lack of a new heart. But it wasn't wrong to baptize him and admit him to the covenant community - for it is not our place to read the heart but to evaluate words and actions to the best of our ability.

The New Covenant is the Oldest Covenant

"So the work of Christ is the source of all human salvation from sin: the salvation of Adam and Eve, of Noah, of Abraham, of Moses, of David, and of all God's people in every age, past, present, or future. Everyone who has ever been saved has been saved through the new covenant in Christ. Everyone who is saved receives a new heart, a heart of obedience, through the new covenant work of Christ. So though it is a new covenant, it is also the oldest, the temporal expression of the pactum salutis [the covenant of peace between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternity]."

John Frame, Systematic Theology, p. 80.

Unconditional Covenants?

"...all covenants require obedient faith. This is a not a condition of one covenant or another; it is essential to all human dealings with God, simply by virtue of who God is. It is a requirement of what I have called the universal covenant. Individual covenants require specific forms of obedience, but obedience itself, springing from faith, is simply a requirement of all relations between God and human beings. This requirement is implicit in the very distinction between Creator and creature....

"This emphasis on faithful obedience does not compromise grace at all. For we can never begin to earn God's forgiveness of our sins through good works, and the blessings that God promises to Abraham are far beyond what any human being could accomplish....

"So like all the other covenants, the Abrahamic covenant is unconditional in the sense that in it God declares that he will certainly accomplish his own purpose, the blessing of the nations through Abraham. But it is conditional in that those who would receive that blessing must trust and obey. As sovereign controller, God is the God of grace. As sovereign authority, he demands obedience of his covenant partners."

John Frame, Systematic Theology, pp. 70-71.

Justification and Sanctification

"Of course, we must also teach good works and love, but it must be done in the right place - that is, when we are dealing with works, not justification. Here the question is how we are justified and attain eternal life, and so we reject and condemn all good works, for this passage will not allow any argument based on good works.

"Indeed, 'the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good' (Romans 7:12). But when we are dealing with justification, it is not the time or place to speak about the law. The question is, who is Christ, and what benefit has he brought us? Christ is not the law; he is not what I have done or what the law has done; he is not my love, my obedience, my poverty. He is the Lord of life and death, a mediator, the Savior, the redeemer of those who are under the law and sin. By faith we are in him and he in us....

"Christ is no law, and therefore he does not exact the law and its observance. He is 'the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world' (John 1:29). It is only faith that takes hold of this, not love. Love, however, must follow faith, as a sort of thankfulness. Victory over sin and death, then, and salvation and everlasting life too, did not come through the law, nor through the observance of the law, nor yet through the power of free will, but through the Lord Jesus Christ alone."

Martin Luther, Galatians, p. 91.

Justified by Faith and Love?

"The right way to become a Christian is to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the observance of the law. Here we must stand, and not upon the wicked interpretation of those who say that faith justifies when love and good works are combined with it. That interpretation obscures this and similar sentences in Paul in which he clearly attributes justification solely to faith in Christ. When people hear that they should believe in Christ, yet faith only justifies if it is formed and accompanied by works of love, eventually they fall from faith and think along these lines: 'If faith without love does not justify, then faith is empty and pointless, and only love in action justifies, for faith is nothing without love....'

"They say that faith in Christ does not make us free from sin, but only faith combined with love. this is to say that Christ leaves us in our sins and in the wrath of God and makes us guilty of eternal death, whereas if you keep the law, faith justifies you because it has works, without which faith is no help. Therefore, works justify, and not faith, they claim. What pernicious and cursed teaching is this!"

Martin Luther, Galatians, pp. 90, 93-94.

Against the Church

"No one willingly says that the church is wrong, and yet it is necessary to say that it is wrong if it teaches anything besides or against God's Word."

Martin Luther, Galatians, p. 59.

The Church is our Mother and to be treated with respect and honor. But the Church is to honor the Word of our Father. When the Church fails to do so, then the disciple must follow the Father for the sake of the Mother. This is how Luther conceived his calling. Unfortunately many modern self-proclaimed "reformers" do not have a proper respect for their Mother and make themselves the sole arbiters of truth rather than the Word. Luther writes earlier in his commentary:

"Since the church is such a soft and tender thing, and so soon overthrown, we must be quick to watch against these people with their mad ideas. When they have given two sermons or have read a few pages of the Holy Scriptures, they reckon they are in control of all learners and teachers and are answerable to no human authority. You can find many such people today, bold and impudent persons who because they have not been tried by temptations have never learned to fear God, nor had any taste or feeling of grace. Because they are empty of the Holy Spirit, they teach what they like best and such things as are plausible and pleasant to the common people. Then the uneducated multitude, longing to hear news, soon joins them." p. 47

I like it!

"When I first took upon me the defense of the Gospel, I remember a worthy man saying to me, 'I like it, this doctrine you preach, because it gives glory and everything else to God alone, and nothing to man, for we cannot attribute too much glory, goodness, mercy, and so on to God.'"

Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (Wheaton: Crossway, 1998), pp. 58-59.