"When churches lose their influence, when the Christian message ceases to arrest the indifferent and the unbelieving, when moral decline is obvious in places which once owned biblical standards -- when such symptoms as these are evident, then the first need is not to regroup such professing Christianity as remains. It is rather to ask whether the spiritual decline is not due to a fundamental failure to understand and practise what Christianity really is." Evangelicalism Divided

"To become a Christian is to experience the power of Christ in the forgiveness of sin and in the receiving of a new life. It is a change accomplished by God and altogether apart from human effort or deserving, for the very faith which is the instrument in uniting the sinner to Christ is itself a gift -- By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8) -- Further, while obedience and love result from the gift of faith, these graces FOLLOW rather than contribute anything to our acceptance with God. It is Christ's finished work alone which secures for ever the believer's status of righteousness and of no condemnation." Evangelicalism Divided

"Christianity means knowing and trusting Christ as a living Person; it is a relationship which so captures both the mind and the heart of the believer that henceforth to know Christ, to esteem him and his words, becomes the very object of existence... A Christian is someone who no longer lives for himself but understands, with Paul, why Christ is his righteousness, his life, his all." Evangelicalism Divided

"In the nineteenth century it came to be believed that the most successful soul-winning belonged to the revival meeting where many are seen to come to Christ as the evangelist calls them to a visible, public decision. Walking the aisle in response to the altar call was so closely identified with conversion that coming to Christ and coming to the front were treated as one and the same thing. Behind the practice lay the fallacy that saving faith is of the same nature as a physical decision, and that if only sinners will answer the evangelist's invitation then grace will secure their rebirth. This thinking was inherited by Billy Graham and it is clearly expressed in the way he has spoken of conversion." Evangelicalism Divided

"The dangers in the invitation system are many. It creates the impression that compliance with it is part of becoming a Christian." Evangelicalism Divided

"Crusades depended upon crowds and in the Graham story there is an almost ever-present concern for maintaining and increasing numbers... This is surely part of the explanation for an eagerness to cultivate connections with the famous whose names would catch attention. Friendship was sought with all whose high profile could reflect with advantage on the message he preached... This cultivation of connections with celebrities came to its fullest expression with political leaders in the United States." Evangelicalism Divided

"The practice of seeking accommodation and acceptance with exponents of error has dimmed the light. Contending for unpopular truth is no longer a duty and the doctrine supposedly necessary for evangelicalism has become so minimal that it has ceased to be distinct." Evangelicalism Divided

"The Graham evangelistic methods do not seem to have been openly questioned by evangelicals in the United States until after the publication of his biography by Marshall Frady in 1979... In his view the BGEA was not so much a spiritual force as a conflux of the kind of American techniques which are well calculated to gain results." Evangelicalism Divided

"The Reformers would have had to shut their Bibles before they could have regarded all their baptized contemporaries as Christians." Evangelicalism Divided

"For the New Testament unity is in order to preserve the faith, not something which can exist irrespective of doctrinal purity." Evangelicalism Divided

"The approval of doctrinal diversity has become the hallmark of one-time evangelicals who have risen to high positions in the Church and left definite convictions behind them." Evangelicalism Divided

"For the Reformers the Reformation was no mere controversy or doctrinal dispute. The Church of Rome, in her opposition to the way of salvation clearly taught in the Scripture, was demonstrating here lack of the Spirit of God... The Roman system, by putting faith in the Church, and its sacramental system, in the place of the finished work of Christ, gave sure proof that she was not being taught of God." Evangelicalism Divided

"Wesley and Whitefield lost any possibility of gaining the good opinion of their peers at the very outset of their work. But, far from moderating themselves in an attempt to win it back, they regarded the very idea as a temptation to be resisted. In the midst of a worldly church they saw the bearing of reproach as a necessary part of being a Christian." Evangelicalism Divided

"There is reason to believe that evangelical policy of more recent times has not given due account to one of the most basic facts of evangelical Christianity. It has lacked due regard to the depravity and deceitfulness of human nature and to what Christ assures will happen when his truth meets the minds of unregenerate man. From apostolic times onwards, wherever the gospel has entered with discriminating power, it has been with disturbance, opposition, and personal reproach for its preachers." Evangelicalism Divided

"There is good reason why the laying aside of an earnest contending for the faith has usually gone hand in hand with a cessation of belief in the full inspiration of Scripture. Once doubt about the words of Scripture is admitted, what is to be defended becomes a great deal less definite. But Scripture itself lays great emphasis on its WORDS." Evangelicalism Divided

“Evangelicals, while commonly retaining the same set of beliefs, have been tempted to seek success in ways which the New Testament identifies as worldliness. Worldliness is departing from God. It is a man-centred way of thinking; it proposes objectives which demand no radical breach with man’s fallen nature; it judges the importance of things by the present and the material results; it weighs success by numbers; it covets human esteem and wants no unpopularity; it knows no truth for which it is worth suffering; it declines to be a fool for Christ’s sake. Worldliness is the mind-set of the unregenerate. It adopts idols and is a war with God.” Evangelicalism Divided

“It is of believers that it is said—the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary one to another—Apostasy generally arises in the church just because this danger ceases to be observed. The consequence is that spiritual warfare gives way to spiritual pacifism, and, in the same spirit, the church devises ways to present the gospel which will neutralize any offence.” Evangelicalism Divided

“The rule of Scripture has given place to pragmatism. The apostolic statement—For if I still pleased men, I would not be the servant of Christ—has lost its meanings.” Evangelicalism Divided

“Human conduct is not capable of being understood so long as it is imagined that man is self-contained and insulated from any power other than his own.” Evangelicalism Divided

"Worldliness is no accident; it is the devil’s use of such idols as pride, selfishness, and pleasure, to maintain his dominion over men. What he proposes for man’s happiness is in truth the result of implacable malice towards the whole human race. He means to exclude God and to destroy men, and the system he has devised to do this is so subtle than man is a willing and unconscious captive.” Evangelicalism Divided

“While we may expect unregenerate men to have no discernment on this issue, it has to be a matter of concern when—given the prominent warnings of the New Testament—the demonic ceases to be a vital part of the belief of professing evangelicals.” Evangelicalism Divided

“Non-Christians are in a condition of blindness and bondage. They are under a power greater than the will of man and from which only Christ can set them free.” Evangelicalism Divided

“We are constantly warned [in the Bible] that Satan works principally through doctrinal deception and falsehood… False prophets arise within the church yet they do not appear as such… The idea that Christianity stands chiefly in danger from the forces of materialism, or from secular philosophy, or from pagan religions, is not the teaching of the New Testament.” Evangelicalism Divided

“To deny the deity and the work of Christ will shut men out of heaven as certainly as will the sin of murder.” Evangelicalism Divided

“The apostles, filled with the Spirit of Christ, suffered no toleration of error. They opposed it wherever it arose and required the same spirit of all Christians.” Evangelicalism Divided

“A biblical contending against error is fully consistent with love, indeed it is love for the souls of men which requires it.” Evangelicalism Divided

“It is the way in which the instrumentality of the devil in corrupting the truth has been so widely overlooked. In this, as I have already said, we differ widely from Scripture. Instead of believers in the apostolic age being directed to listen to all views with an open mind, they were told how to test the spirits, whether they are of God… When churches have been in a healthy state they have always been watchful in this regard.” Evangelicalism Divided

“The idea that error false teaching is only an innocent mistake and an inevitable part of scholarship is directly contrary to Scripture. Many deceivers have gone out into the world is the apostolic testimony, and this activity is going to continue… The struggle in the future, as in the past, is to be with false religion.” Evangelicalism Divided

“The evangelical, then, does not put the external first, because Scripture does not put it first. The gospel comes first. It is by the gospel that election takes effect; that God adds to the church; and therefore where that gospel is obscured or denied, and where the biblical terms of admission and membership are no longer upheld, the external may become church in name only. When that happens there are two churches: not the visible and the invisible, but the true and the false.” Evangelicalism Divided

“A church which supposes she can impress the world is no church at all, for she is denying a first principle of the gospel.” Evangelicalism Divided

“It is patently clear that New Testament church members were meant to be true believers and separate from the world; the church is never defined in Scripture so as to allow the presence of the worldly and the unbeliever.” Evangelicalism Divided

“No one Scripture is to be interpreted so as to deny many others. The New Testament churches were required to be distinct from the world; there was to be credible evidence of faith and repentance in those admitted to membership; they were to exclude as well as include.” Evangelicalism Divided

“This [the ecumenical movement] is the assassination of Christianity and its gospel. There is no juster way to describe this spirit of antichrist… Unless the ecumenical movement resolutely and explicitly sets its face against this antichristianity, the prospect of the organization on a worldwide scale of a vast and immensely powerful church of antichrist, embracing any and every form of pseudo-Christianity, paganism, and heathenism, is far from fanciful. And this will be a church so incredible as to be unrecognizable as the Church of Christ, so totally assimilated to the image of the unregenerate world that the church and world will be indistinguishably merged into one. If and when this happens it will mean the eclipse and disappearance of the visible church of the West.” Philip E. Hughes, op. cit., Evangelicalism Divided

“It has never been by putting unity first that the church has changed the world. At no point in church history has the mere unity of numbers ever made a transforming spiritual impression upon others. On the contrary, it was in the very period known as the dark ages that the Papacy could claim her greatest unity in western Europe.” Evangelicalism Divided

“The Reformers recovered from Scripture the forgotten truth that the work of Christ in salvation did not end with his ascension, thereafter to be carried on by the church and human energies. Rather, Christ remains the source of all authority, life, and power. It is by him that his people are preserved and their numbers increased. But this on-going ministry he exercises through the Holy Spirit, whose work it is to apply to sinners the blessings purchased for them at Calvary.” Revivals And Revivalism

“Such is man’s state in sin that he cannot be saved without the immediate influence of the Holy Spirit. Regeneration, and the faith that results from it, are the gifts of God. Therefore, wherever conversions are multiplied, the cause is to be found not in men, nor in favourable conditions, but in the abundant influences of the Spirit of God that alone make the testimony of the church effective.” Revivals And Revivalism

“There is a sovereignty in all God’s actions. He has never promised to bless in proportion to the activity of his people. Revivals are not brought about by the fulfillment of conditions any more than the conversion of a single individual is secured by any series of human actions. The special seasons of mercy are determined in heaven.” Revivals And Revivalism

“If we can trust Scripture only so far as our reason can accept it we are not Christians at all.” Evangelicalism Divided

“In the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries numbers were misled by the argument that the Bible is more easily defended if it is not necessary to accept the inerrancy of all its details.” Evangelicalism Divided

“Belief in the trustworthiness of all Scripture is essential for the preservation of the Christian faith as a whole. Without verbal inspiration the church cannot sustain a dependable corporate witness. All authoritative exposition depends upon it… To make concessions to doubt at this point has been a tragic mistake and grievous to the Spirit of God.” Evangelicalism Divided

“The biblical portrait of false teachers is a very clear one. While they profess to speak for God, they mislead people over their true condition in God’s sight. They do not speak faithfully to the unconverted.” Evangelicalism Divided

“The decay of Christianity in the west in the twentieth century is not the result of sociological and secular pressures. Spiritual decline is not a mystery which Scripture leaves unexplained. It is the result of the presence of falsehood where there should be truth.” Evangelicalism Divided

“At every point in Christian life and labour it is the certainty of what is future which is to govern the present.” Evangelicalism Divided

“The New Testament indicates that while the Spirit is always present in the church the degrees of his power and influence remain subject to Christ Himself... Whatever the condition of the churches, the plenitude of the Spirit remains with Christ.” Pentecost - Today?

“It was not that at a certain date the reformers realised what they already had and therefore decided to act; it was rather that something had first happened to them.” Pentecost - Today?

“The New Testament never leaves the Christian in the position of believing that all necessary grace and help is not now available.” Pentecost - Today?

“If we think only that the Holy Spirit is continuously resident in the church, as if necessarily present and inherent in the means of grace, we can easily begin to forget how urgently we stand in need of the supernatural.” Pentecost - Today?

“If revival depends upon us then it is more than a possibility that Christians will be eager to make it happen. Accordingly all kinds of means may be adopted and, if these produce excitement and crowds, it may even appear for a time as though expectation were fulfilled. Probably nothing has done more to demean the whole idea of revival than just such highly publicised efforts and their temporary results.” Pentecost - Today?

“The fundamental question has to do with whether or not the sin of Adam has ruined the nature of all his posterity... sin is not simply a matter of actions which we repeat because we learn them from the example of others. It is rather the result of an evil principle which lies at  the centre of a nature which is fallen. Actual sins are only the surface proof of a deeper corruption beneath... for God to deal with our sins would not be enough. It is our sinfulness which is the fundamental problem.” Pentecost - Today?

“Finney’s great argument was that if men have to experience a change of nature before they can become Christians, and such a change as only God can effect, then no sinner can be responsible for his unbelief and lack of repentance... he deduced that men must possess the ability to obey. This deduction sounds rational and logical, but it is not scriptural... Hence what became known as the altar call, that is, the practice of calling those who would be converted to take some visible action which would clinch the matter... This new teaching was thus popularising a dangerously superficial view of conversion, arising out of a superficial view of sin. Man’s plight is a great deal more serious than the representation implied by the new measures... the many who responded to the measures without being converted were in a far worse position, for in coming forward they did what they were told to do without any result. With some justification they could come to regard conversion as an illusion... The new teaching, by putting the emphasis on the instant action taken by an individual following the evangelist’s appeal and not upon a changed life, inevitably lowered standards of membership in evangelical churches and so encouraged an acceptance of worldliness among professing Christians.” Pentecost - Today?

“Martyn Lloyd-Jones, when asked to be chairman for the Berlin Congress of the Billy Graham Organization in 1966, declined to do so unless the practice of public appeal was given up by Dr. Graham.” Pentecost - Today?

“Where there is no alienation from sin there is no re-birth. Under the new evangelism this ceased to be recognised and so there grew up many forms of holiness teaching meant to help the numbers of ‘unsanctified Christians’ now in the churches. Meanwhile the fundamental reason for the existence of so many ‘carnal Christians’ was largely unrecognised.” Pentecost - Today?

“All duties are vain the sight of God where the pursuit of holiness is absent.” Pentecost - Today?

“While a special duty lies upon those who teach, all believers are to be steadfast in maintaining and defending—even to death—all that God has revealed for our salvation. Heresy and error are no trivial things according to Scripture.” Pentecost - Today?

“Prayer for revival is no substitute for repentance and immediate obedience to the Word of God.” Pentecost - Today?

“God gives promises and duties as instrumental means to blessing, not as causes, for the grace of God is in the means as well as in the result.” Pentecost - Today?

“To make human action the cause of divine blessing is to overturn the whole nature of salvation.” Pentecost - Today?

“Effectual prayer has a divine source and it achieves the purpose which God himself intended.” Pentecost - Today?

“Instead of putting our hopes in the quantity of prayer, as though that will bring revival, our trust needs to be in the God who is himself the prime mover.” Pentecost - Today?

“God has chosen to make prayer a means of blessing, not so that the fulfillment of his purposes becomes dependent upon us, but rather to help us learn our absolute dependence upon him.” Pentecost - Today?

“The sufferings of Calvary are effective to overcome all unworthiness and sin. There are no barriers and no backslidings which sovereign love cannot overcome.” Pentecost - Today?

“All spiritual weakness is ultimately due to poverty of thought about God, and such weakness will persist as long as we suppose that man is the starting point for its resolution.” Pentecost - Today?

“Scripture never tells the believer that the success of his work for Christ is the priority.” Pentecost - Today?

“It is the work of the Spirit to make hearers conscious of a presence distinct from that of the speaker.” Pentecost - Today?

“True Christianity cannot exist without real communion with God, and neither can true preaching.” Revival And Revivalism

"Not to be taught by the Spirit, not to have such faith as originates in his light and power, is not to be a Christian at all." Pentecost - Today?