Solomon doesn’t just show us how ugly sin is to scare us off. He also shows us how winsome wisdom is. Wisdom captivates, fascinates, intrigues, attracts, allures, and enthralls until we are drawn, not just willingly but irresistibly, to her magnetic charms. Yes, we need to dissuade from sin, but the biggest dissuader is the beauty of divine wisdom” (David Murray, The Christian Ministry, Loc. 1642).

Once we come to Christ, the Wisdom of God, and see Him as the One who alone kept this book, and who gives us His Proverbs-Righteousness, we can see the Proverbs not so much as a condemning AK-47 but as a detailed manual to help us figure out how to live in multiple areas of life. How merciful of God to give us not just incarnate Wisdom, but such practical every day wisdom to help us live in grateful obedience to the God who made us wise unto salvation” (David Murray, The Christian Ministry, Loc. 1635).

Joy usually doesn’t just land on our lap as a blank check. No, we have to work for it, we have to pursue it, and we have to use the means God has provided. Happiness is hard work. Part of that work is re-believing the Gospel, re-savoring the Gospel” (David Murray, The Christian Ministry, Loc. 2016).

Recently, in an essay in Church Life Journal, Scott Beauchamp wrote about what he called the new epidemic of kinlessness. The first demographic transition had whittled the dense kinship network of the clan down to the nuclear family; the second was destroying even that. Many people now live in a world with no close kin, or only a few. It is, as he describes it, an epidemic of loneliness. [Source]

Wherever possible, students should spend a minimum of five years trying to hold down a job and even progress in a career before studying for the ministry. I know there are exceptions to this rule, but they are very rare. It would root out a lot of doomed candidates and it would tell us a huge amount about whether they have the EQ [“emotional intelligence”] for the ministry. As a bonus, the work experience would also be worth any number of seminary classes in terms of preparation for the ministry. I have to admit, though, every time a young man has told me that he’s called to the ministry and I’ve recommended that he go away and work for five years before Seminary, not one has taken my advice. Thus far, the results speak for themselves (David Murray, The Christian Ministry, Loc. 360).

When reviewing Paul’s description of the Christian pastor in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, I was struck again by how much emphasis he places on exceptional character rather than exceptional gifts, and by his focus on what a pastor is to be rather than what a pastor is to do. And yet, when seminaries are training pastors, when churches are seeking pastors, and when pastors are pursuing training, we often turn the Bible’s priorities upside down (David Murray, The Christian Ministry, Loc. 254).

The Institutes is an extended hymn of praise by an exiled Frenchman to a saving God he believed never abandoned the faithful. It was deeply personal. Faith, Calvin writes, is to know that God is Father (Bruce Gordon, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography, 12).

Calvin would have hated the designation of his Institutes as a book of academic theology. That was precisely what it was not. Above all, his creation was a structured exposition of the biblical account of divinity and humanity, of what Christians should know and how they should live. . . . The Institutes was a book to be lived (Bruce Gordon, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography, xiii).

Materialism is part of a larger pursuit, not merely of the idols that material possessions may become but of the idol of acceptance. At the deepest levels of our hearts, we want more than simply stuff. We want people to accept us, and one of the ways we sometimes imagine that we will achieve acceptance is by having lots of things: an impressive resume, beauty, fame, or power (Alan D. Strange, Imputation of the Active Obedience of Chrsit in the Westminster Standards, xv).

Christ’s death indeed removes the debt of sin, but it is His active obedience accounted (or imputed) to us that gives us the perfect righteousness we need. We have a need not only for our sin to be paid for but also for the law to be kept for us positively (Alan D. Strange, Imputation of the Active Obedience of Christ in the Westminster Standards, xi).