Inspirational Quotes by James Montgomery Boice

“Paul's suffering was neither corrective nor instructive. It was simply permitted by God so that the gospel might spread to others.”

“is the world or the church is actually irrelevant. The point is simply that the devil is going to bring forward people (whether in the church or out of it) so much like true Christians, yet not Christians, that even the servants of God will not be able to tell them apart.”

“Finally, you must sell off your sinful pleasures and practices, too. It is not pleasure itself that must be sold off. There are holy pleasures, for the saints are a joyful people. It is only sinful pleasure that must go, for you cannot serve God and sin. You cannot say that you love Christ and fail to keep His commandments. Do you find that hard? Do you draw back? Is that too great a price to pay for salvation? If so, you are not the man of Christ’s parable who finds the treasure and sells all he has to have it. You are not the merchant who trades off everything to possess the great pearl. You have not even properly seen the value of what you are rejecting.”

“ten thousand talents. It is hard to estimate exactly what that was worth, and it may in fact only mean the largest debt conceivable, “ten thousand” being one of the largest common numbers and a “talent” being the largest denomination of currency. However, if we do estimate it in dollars, we derive some interesting results. A talent was seventy-five pounds, so ten thousand talents would be 750,000 pounds. We do not know whether they were talents of gold or silver. But since Jesus is trying to exaggerate the contrast between this great debt and the relatively small debt of verse 28, we may suppose that He was thinking of the greater of the two talents, namely, gold. In troy weight there are twelve ounces to a pound. So we are now dealing with 750,000 times 12, or 9 million ounces of gold. Assuming that gold is selling at about $400 an ounce, we come to a figure of $3,600 million (three trillion six hundred million dollars). That is beyond our comprehension, which is precisely Christ’s point. It is an astronomical debt, entirely beyond this servant’s or anybody else’s capacity to pay.”

“if we are justified we will have that nature of God that will increasingly and inevitably express itself in forgiveness, just as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven us, we will be able to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). The Lutherans says: “We are justified by faith alone, but not by a faith which is alone.” It is always faith and life: first, the life of God within; then faith; then, the expression of the inner, divine life in what we do. The conclusion is: if we do not forgive, we are not forgiven. We are not justified. We are not God’s children, regardless of what our profession may be.”

“As Christians, we must be on guard against Satan’s tactics. We are warned not only against his infusion of his own people into the Christian community, but also against the visible church’s bureaucratic growth (which confuses size and structure with spiritual fruit) and against the infusion of evil into the lives even of believing people (which confuses a loving and forgiving spirit with treason to Christ’s cause). In other words, we are to beware of the secular church and evangelical secularism as well.”

“The secular church is one dominated by the world, as much of the contemporary church is. It is characterized by the world’s wisdom, the world’s theology, the world’s agenda, and the world’s methods. The evangelical church, when it is secular, is one that seeks to do God’s work but in the world’s way. It looks to the media and money rather than to God and His power, which is unleashed through prayer.”

“in election and “irresistible” grace God does not disregard or act contrary to the will of any man or woman, as implied above. Rather, He regenerates the individual, as the result of which a will is born that now desires what the old will previously despised. Before, George hated Christ. Now he loves Him and so comes willingly when the gospel is preached. Again, if Mary desires to come, it is not in spite of God’s predetermination in her case but because of it.”

“You are not called to poverty in Christ but to the greatest of spiritual wealth. You are not called to disappointment but to fulfillment. You are not called to sorrow but to joy. How could it be otherwise when the treasure is the only Son of God?”

“When Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God, He came preaching God’s right to rule over the minds and hearts of all people. But that is precisely what the people involved did not want. Adam did not want it. He had great freedom, but he was offended by God’s unreasonable and arbitrary (so he judged) restriction in the case of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

“A parable is a story taken from real life (or a real-life situation) from which a moral or spiritual truth is drawn. Examples are many: the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14), the wedding banquet (Matt. 22:1–14; Luke 14:15–24), the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31–46), and others, including the parables of the kingdom that will occupy our attention in this first set of studies. By my count there are about twenty-seven parables, though some are closely related and may simply be different versions of the same story.”

“Parables differ from fables in that a fable is not a real situation. An example of a fable is any of Aesop’s stories, in which animals talk. In those stories the animals are simply people in disguise. Parables also differ from allegories, since in an allegory each or nearly each detail has meaning. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are essentially allegories. In the parables of Jesus not every detail has meaning. Indeed, to try to force meaning into each one can produce strange and even demonstrably false doctrines. Parables are merely real-life stories from which one or possibly a few basic truths are drawn.”

“What is it that leads such a person to reject the truth of God in the first place? According to Paul, it is a determined opposition to the nature of God Himself, which the apostle describes as human “ungodliness and unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18).”

“When the tax collector prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” he was thinking of the animal sacrifices because, although Jesus was then present, He had not yet died. When we pray the tax collector’s prayer, we think of Jesus and the way in which God has provided a full and perfect salvation through Him. Do you think of Jesus? Have you prayed that prayer? No one will ever be justified who has not prayed it, nor will anyone be received by God who has not first of all taken his stand with sinners in need of that mercy that God alone provides.”

“The Bible says that the revelation of God in nature condemns us for our failure to recognize Him. Romans 1:18–20 (NIV) says that “the wrath of God” is being revealed from heaven against all people because “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” No one has ever come to our Lord Jesus Christ through nature alone.”

“These two parables as well as other teachings of the Lord about prayer cut to pieces the false doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God that has been so popular in this century. They teach that God is not the Father of all men. He is the Creator of all. But He is uniquely the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ and becomes the Father only of those persons who believe on Christ.”

“Mary was still thinking in terms of a dead body when Jesus confronted her with His living presence.”

“The thief on the cross had to be the luckiest man alive. He was nothing more than a low-life criminal, a loser. He had committed a crime. He was convicted for it, and he was crucified for it. So he had no future; he was going nowhere; or worse, he was going to hell. Yet of all the criminals, on all the crosses, on all the hills in the Roman Empire, he was crucified next to Jesus Christ.”

“Our problem, like Jonah's, does not lie in the parts of Scripture we find difficult to understand. Like him, we turn away from the word of the Lord that we do understand. We do not read it, we do not love it, we have become almost incapable of meditating upon it; we are careless, if not actually callous about submitting to it.”

“To know God as he is, is to love him as he is and to want to be like him.”