IsaiahC

The law serves a most necessary purpose. They [unbelievers] will never accept grace until they tremble before a just and holy Law.

Charles Spurgeon

So it is with the work-righteous and the proud unbelievers. Because they do not know the law of God, which is directed against them, it is impossible for them to know their sin.

Martin Luther

The trouble with people who are not seeking for a Savior, and for salvation, is that they do not understand the nature of sin. It is the peculiar function of the law to bring such an understanding to a man’s mind and conscience.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

In my preaching of the Word, I took special notice of this one thing, namely, that the Lord did lead me to begin where His Word begins with sinners; that is, to condemn all flesh, and to open and allege that the curse of God, by the law doth belong to and lay hold on all men as they come into the world, because of sin.

John Bunyan

I would declare a moratorium on public preaching of the “the plan of salvation” in America for one to two years. Then, I would call on everyone who has use of the airwaves and the pulpits to preach the holiness of God, the righteousness of God, and the law of God, until sinners would cry out, “What must we do to be saved?” Then, I would take them off in a corner and whisper the gospel to them….Such drastic action is needed because we have gospel-hardened a generation of sinners by telling them how to be saved before they have any understanding why they need to be saved.

Paris Reidhead

Grace means nothing to a person who does not know he is sinful and that such sinfulness means he is separated from God and damned. It is therefore pointless to preach grace until the impossible demands of the law and the reality of guilt before God are preached.

John MacArthur

I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the law.

Charles Spurgeon

Before I can preach love, mercy, and grace, I must preach sin, law and judgment.

John Wesley

That is the reason we have so many ‘mushroom’ converts, because their stony ground is not plowed up; they have not got a conviction of the law; they are stony-ground hearers.

George Whitfield

Satan, the god of all dissension, stirreth up daily new sects, and last of all, which of all other I should never have foreseen or once suspected, he has raised up a sect such as teach…that men should not be terrified by the law, but gently exhorted by the preaching of the grace of Christ.

Martin Luther

When 100 years ago earnest scholars decreed that the law had no relationship to the preaching of the gospel, they deprived the Holy Spirit in the area where their influence prevailed of the only instrument with which He had ever armed Himself to prepare sinners for grace.

Paris Reidhead

We cannot come to Christ to be justified until we have first been to Moses to be condemned. But once we have gone to Moses and acknowledged our sin, guilt and condemnation, we must not stay there.

John R.W. Stott

A new and more powerful proclamation of [the] law is perhaps the most pressing need of the hour; men would have little difficulty with the gospel if they had only learned the lesson of the law.

J Gresham Machen

I can always tell a man who is near the kingdom of God; his mouth is stopped. This, then, is why God gives us the law. To show us ourselves in our true colors.

D.L. Moody

HT: DefCon

At the heart of Reformed Theology, at the heart of Luther and Calvin’s struggle, and in Knox and Jonathan Edwards, were men who were awakened to the greatness, to the majesty, to the holiness, and the sovereignty of God. By contemplating the holiness and sovereignty of God, they were driven to develop their doctrines of the grace of God. Because until you meet a God who is holy and is sovereign, you don’t know what grace means. I don’t think we are ever going to see a healthy evangelical church until the evangelical church is solidly Reformed, where it takes biblical Christianity seriously with a right concept of a sovereign God.

That’s because unreformed Christianity has failed in our culture. It has been pervasively antinomian (no law, no Lordship), and has been pervasively liberal in it’s trends and tendencies away from Scripture, because there’s been no real basis in the sovereignty of God.

Today’s evangelicals are never amazed by grace, because they don’t understand sovereignty. They don’t understand God. The evangelical church today is sick, more sick than it ever has been. We need a style and a variety of Christianity that is not a religion, but is a life and a worldview, where at the heart and foundational structure of it is a sound and deep biblical concept of the character of God.

Dr. R.C. Sproul, A Blueprint for Thinking

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.

John Donne

HT: Dead Theologians

Does it follow from: 'turn ye' that therefore you can turn? Does it follow from 'Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart' (Deut 6.5) that therefore you can love with all your heart? What do arguments of this kind prove, but the 'free-will' does not need the grace of God, but can do all things by its own power ... But it does not follow from this that man is converted by his own power, nor do the words say so; they simply say: "if thou wilt turn, telling man what he should do. When he knows it, and sees that he cannot do it, he will ask whence he may find ability to do it...

Bondage of the Will, p. 164
Martin Luther