Quotes about Principles

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

The faithfulness principle (of the conservative) and the flexibility principle (of the liberal) are two sides of the same coin. They are both necessary if Christians are to follow their instructions and remain simultaneously "in" the world but not "of" it.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of principles to be obeyed apart from identification with Jesus Christ. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting his way with us.

Patience is not the same as indifference; patience conveys the idea of someone who is tremendously strong and able to withstand all assaults. Having the vision of God is the source of patience because it gives us God's true and proper inspiration. Moses endured, not because of his devotion to his principles of what was right, nor because of his sense of duty to God, but because he had a vision of God.

We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.

your alarm that is your conscience only sounds based on the standard that your heart has surrendered to. This means that a good and godly moral value system will all your conscience to function properly, but a bad and self-centered moral value system will mean that your conscience will do you harm.

The central focus of the Bible is not a set of practical-life principles. No, the central theme of the Bible is a person, Christ. If all you and I had needed was a knowledge and understanding of a certain set of God-revealed principles for living, Jesus would not have needed to come.

The Bible is the grand biography of the Lord Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Bible is the annotated story of the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, his story with God's essential explanatory and applicatory notes. You do violence to the Word of God when you reduce it to a book of theology, principles, and rules. You simply cannot make sense of Scripture without the person and work—the grace—of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We must work the system without allowing the system to corrupt us.

Thus, we need the Bible as the guide to enable us to transform and purify our hermeneutical principles. The circle from the Bible to systematic theology to hermeneutics to the Bible is not a vicious circle, but a spiral of growth and progress, guided by the work of the Holy Spirit in illumination.

What are the facts of history? And do they matter? The importance of this study is more than historical. Establishing that George Washington was a Christian helps to substantiate the critical role that Christians and Christian principles played in the founding of our nation.