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

"...ever since the fall of man, there has been only two choices when it comes to religions. Now, listen, one may come in a myriad of colors, and different wrappers, and in different boxes, but inside it has the exact same nutritional value. It's like one of those generic cereals, you know, it doesn't matter which wrapper it comes in, it's the same stuff all the way across the board.

There's just two: there's the religion of "You MUST do! You MUST do! You MUST do!" and there's the religion of "Done!"

God in His grace has acted! (Charles) Spurgeon would say it like this: there's the religion of human achievement where a person has to get on the rat wheel and keep running and running and make it work or there's the religion of divine accomplishment -- it was done by the Lord Jesus Christ!"

"I am increasingly convinced that so much in the state of the Christian church today is to be explained chiefly by the fact that for nearly a hundred years the church has been preaching morality and ethics, and not the Christian faith. It is this preaching of the ‘good life’, or being ‘a good little gentleman’, and of viewing religion as ‘morality touched by emotion’, as Matthew Arnold put it, that has been the curse. Such men have shed the doctrines; they dislike any idea of atonement, they dismiss the whole notion of the miraculous and the supernatural, and ridicule talk about re-birth. Christianity to them is that which teaches a man to live a good life."

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

Let us ever glory in the cross of Christ; let us regard it as the source of all our hopes, and the foundation of all our peace. Ignorance and unbelief may see nothing in the sufferings of Calvary but the cruel martyrdom of an innocent person: faith will look far deeper; faith will see in the death of Jesus the payment of man’s enormous debt to God, and the complete salvation of all who believe.

-- J.C. Ryle

HT: J.C. Ryle Quotes

I am Reformed because of one thing: Consistently, honestly, and thoroughly read, God’s Word, the Bible, teaches that God is sovereign over all things, that man is a fallen creature, and that God saves perfectly in Jesus Christ. It is the consistent application of sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) and tota Scriptura (all of Scripture) that leads inevitably to the doctrines of grace.

-- James White