“When a preacher avoids concrete ethical applications in his sermons,” comments John Frame, “he is not preaching the full counsel of God, and he is not adequately edifying his people.”

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching, 138.

The analogy of Scripture should be reflected not merely in our hermeneutics, but also in our homiletics. . . . This balance between the explication and the application of the Word of God is, we believe, irrefutably established by the analogy of Scripture and powerfully confirmed by the history of Reformed preaching.

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching, 144.

Sin is not simply the rejection of God’s law; it is the rejection of the God who holds out that law as the condition of fellowship with Him.

STEPHEN G. MYERS, GOD TO US – COVENANT THEOLOGY IN SCRIPTURE, 182.

Scholasticism was not something practiced only by “rigid” Reformed theologians; Lutheran and Roman Catholic authors also made ample use of this theological method after the Reformation. In that respect, scholasticism was an ecumenical enterprise. Secondly, scholasticism was not used only in the seventeenth century. The entire Western church had done scholastic theology since the eleventh century. A scholastic approach was also applied in other academic disciplines. The term “scholasticism” thus should not so much be associated with content but with method, an academic form of argumentation and disputation.

Willem J. van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 14.

The Scriptures declare that there is a government jure Divino in the visible church of Christ now under the New Testament. This is evident from 1 Corinthians 12:28: “God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers . . . helps, governments,” in which place these things are plain.

Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici, 54.

The presbyterial government (truly so called) is not in nature any invention of man, but an ordinance of Christ; nor is the execution of it to be stated by the will of man, but only by the sure word of prophecy, the sacred Scriptures.

Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici, 44.

The fact that liberal theology with its naive Pelagianism has dangerously over-emphasized the concept of example does not mean that there is no role nor place for the concept of example in Reformed preaching.

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching: A Theology of Sacred Rhetoric, 128.

Old Testament examples are New Testament instructions.

From John Owen’s Hebrews: The Epistle of Warning quoted in John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching: A Theology of Sacred Rhetoric, 122.

Let us resist the beginning of evil. Let us banish sinful thoughts. We are in danger from a single evil thought. If we suffer it to lodge and rest in the heart, we rock a giant. It will soon arise and overpower us.

From sermon on Mortification of Sin by Asahel Nettleton quoted in John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching: A Theology of Sacred Rhetoric, 104.

Christianity begins with a momentous declaration. It does not begin by telling the sinner what he must do; it begins by telling the sinner what God has done. Thus Machen is absolutely correct when he asserts in Christianity and Liberalism that ‘liberalism is altogether in the imperative mood’.

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching: A Theology of Sacred Rhetoric, 82.