Tag Archives: The Gospel According to Jesus-MacArthur

Quotes of the Week

Little Sins

Catch the foxes for us,
the little foxes
that spoil the vineyards.
Song of Songs 2:15

A little thorn can cause much suffering. A small cloud may hide the sun. Tiny foxes spoil the vineyards; and little sins do mischief to the tender heart. These small sins burrow in the soul and fill it with what is hateful to Christ, and thus our comfortable fellowship and communion with Him is spoiled. A great sin cannot destroy a Christian, but a little sin can make him miserable.

~Spurgeon

They are not seeking truth but seeking to put forth their own point of view ~ Linda

It cannot end there for a true believer. One with genuine faith cannot hear the Lord’s words and walk away without acting on them. The faithful will be more than shocked, more than amazed, more than admiring–they will be obedient. They are building a structure on solid rock.

* Obeying the words of Christ is equivalent to building on solid rock.

Obedience is the inevitable manifestation of true faith.

The state of mind that refuses obedience is pure and simple unbelief.

Faith obeys. Unbelief rebels.

~Excerpts from The Gospel According to Jesus by John MacArthur

Becoming a Christian is waging a war against yourself.

Are you willing to abandon the sovereignty you exercise over your own life and confess Jesus as Lord?

~From a sermon on Matthew 7:13-17 by John MacArthur

One man with God is a majority though there be a thousand on the other side. ~ Spurgeon

All these quotes came from my readings and what I listened to these past couple weeks. They are for my own benefit and hopefully yours, too.

We drove to Spokane yesterday to do some shopping and when we arrived at the kids house to drop off their items we enjoyed quite the noisy thunderstorm. Every time the thunder rumbled, Addy asked, “What’s that?” One of the times she wanted me to hide with her on the couch with a pillow in front of our faces. It seems JJ can’t sleep well when it’s too quiet. Jamie tried to have him sleep in his own room with the monitor on. He kept waking up. She finally brought him into the living area with music going, Addy making noise and the vacuum going and he fell right to sleep and stayed asleep. Hmm.  I got some extra cuddle time with JJ while we were there, too. When we arrived home our power was out but came back on shortly after 9 PM. Glad that was a short outage. Hope you all have a good weekend.

Little brother content and asleep with all the noise a busy family produces!

 

The Rest of the Tour

After we left the University, Laura and I took Flat Stanley to see The Fremont Troll, some floating houses, views of the Space Needle and a statue of Chief Seattle.

Here’s a link if you want more information on the Troll. The sad thing about this fun Seattle sight is that drug addicts have chosen to use this sight to shoot up and discard their needles here. When we were there a concerned citizen had already picked up over 30 discarded needles. He was warning people with children to watch out.

Some of the floating houses on Lake Union in Seattle.

Views of downtown Seattle from Queen Anne’s Kerry Park.

This statue of Chief Seattle is in the Belltown area of Seattle between 5th Avenue and Cedar Street in the shadow of the Space Needle. I’ll add a link for anyone who wants to read more about the man Seattle was named after here. I found this quote about him interesting:

“What we know of Sealth (pronounced SEE-elth, with a guttural stop at the end) and his life is mostly conjecture based upon myth with a little bit of extrapolated fact. That he was a tyee, or chief, has never been disputed. His father, Schweabe, had been a tyee, and the title was hereditary, though it conferred no power upon the holder. The Suquamish listened to the tyee only when he said what the people wanted to hear. The remainder of the time, a tyee was expected to share his largess with the rest of the tribe during a potlatch.”

Seattle, Chief of the Suquamish, A Friend of The Whites. For Him the City of Seattle was named by it’s Founders.

This week I’m adding three quotes from my readings that I want to remember.

“Loving, not being loved, is essential.” John Piper

A line from a hymn by John Newton, 1779, that Alistair Begg shared on an interview about Prayer:

“Thou art coming to a King, large petitions with thee bring”

I’ll be sharing the full hymn on a Sunday in the future.

This last quote and the longest is from The Gospel According to Jesus by John MacArthur, page 46.

“The call to Calvary must be recognized for what it is: a call to discipleship under the lordship of Jesus Christ. To respond to that call is to become a believer. Anything less is unbelief.

The gospel according to Jesus explicitly and unequivocally rules out easy-believism. To make all of our Lord’s difficult demands apply only to a higher class of Christians blunts the force of His entire message. It makes room for a cheap and meaningless faith – faith that may be exercised with absolutely no impact on the fleshly life of sin. That is not saving faith.”

Have a Thursday filled with good thoughts!

Birthday Week Favorites

My Birthday celebration started early with a Mexican meal on Tuesday that Dan, Jamie, Addy, Linda, Scott and Rhonda were a part of. It was a good time and Jamie brought a special dessert for each of us in little canning jars, blueberry cobbler. Linda is our DIL Jamie’s mother and Scott is Jamie’s Uncle and Rhonda is Scott’s wife and we are all huge fans of Addy.

On my actual birthday morning our dear daughter-in-law brought Addy by with a bouquet of flowers for me. This was such a sweet surprise and I’m so thankful Jamie took a photo of her at the front door before I opened the door with my robe on and wet hair! Addy wasn’t sure about me with wet hair and my glasses off but warmed up when she realized that scary figure was in fact her Baba!

Besides my morning cup of coffee, on my birthday Dear made me his famous Swedish Pancakes with side eggs in between his work obligations. Perks of working from home.

Phone calls and text messages from kids and family and Facebook good wishes were fun to receive and read through the day.

After Dear’s work was done we went into town to run errands and decided to try Chateau Vin, a new spot to us, for early dinner which is not new to us. It was good and we would take any wine enthusiasts there when they visit. We I have a goal of trying every eatery in our area. We’ve tried most already. It’s not a hard goal since our community and the others around us are small. Many of the establishments are closed on Sunday and Monday. Some are closed on Monday and Tuesday. Only a handful are open every day. The only national chains in our town are McDonald’s, Subway, Taco Bell, and KFC. Local chains are Zip’s, Taco Time, and Westside Pizza.

I’m retired and how to use my daily awake hours are mostly up to my discretion. I’m settling in to really enjoy my morning time reading the Bible and some devotionals and books before I continue on with the busyness of the day. In the recent past I lapsed horribly in this good endeavor. Currently I’m on a 5 day a week plan on reading the Bible through in a year. I read my Spurgeon yearly devotional which I’m happy to reread each year. I’ve added Piper’s Taste and See for the first part of the year. Then my two current books, not devotionals, that I try to read a chapter from each morning are Begg’s, Pathway to Freedom, and MacArthur’s, The Gospel According to Jesus. Dear already read these books so we can discuss what we read. I’ve gained from this discipline in my life for sure and it’s not just a discipline but it is worship and it is good even if I don’t “feel” something at the moment. The Holy Spirit uses what gets into my brain and heart and brings it back to me at interesting times, like 2 a.m. in the morning. The key for me is that I don’t turn on my computer until I’m done with this morning time.

My morning view.

Joining Susanne at Living to Tell the Story for Friday’s Fave Five.

Dear and I are driving south to Spokane today to have a birthday dinner at Churchhill’s Steakhouse. I won’t be around to visit until tomorrow since driving into Spokane is a several hour event for us. Ninety minutes to get there and then we have to shop at some of our favorites that we don’t have in Colville, dinner, and then ninety minutes to get home.

Enjoy your Friday!