What we suffer from today, wrote Chesterton in the previous century, “is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition … [and] settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”
— Kevin DeYoung, from Why We’re Not Emergent, p. 40
The most important issues for God are moral purity, theological fidelity, compassion, joy, our witness, faithfulness, hospitality, love, worship, and faith. These are His big concerns. The problem is that we tend to focus most of our attention on everything else. We obsess over the things God has not mentioned and may never mention, while, by contrast, we spend little time on all the things God has already revealed to us in the Bible.
— Kevin DeYoung, from Just Do Something, p. 44
Machen writes, “But if any one fact is clear, on the basis of this evidence, it is that the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based, not upon mere feeling, not upon a mere program of work, but upon an account of facts. In other words it was based upon doctrine.” As soon as you say Jesus died and rose again for your sins according to the Scriptures, you have doctrine. You have a message about what happened in history and what it means. That’s theology. There is no gospel without it.
— Kevin DeYoung, from Why We’re Not Emergent, p. 113
He [God] expects us to trust Him and to be wise. This is the theme of Proverbs, especially chapter 2. Consider verses 1-6 (NIV):
My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.
— Kevin DeYoung, from Just Do Something, p. 89
J. Gresham Machen observed seventy-five years ago “this curious fact—when men talk thus about propagating Christianity without defending it, the thing that we are propagating is pretty sure not to be Christianity at all. They are propagating an anti-intellectualistic, nondoctrinal Modernism; and the reason why it requires no defense is simply that it is so completely in accord with the current of the age.” Nobody objects to a nondoctrinal Christianity because there is nothing to object to.
— Kevin DeYoung, from Why We’re Not Emergent, p. 107
Maybe you’ve heard the joke about the man who was hoping to get a word from the Lord and happened to turn to Matthew 27:5 where it says that Judas “went and hanged himself.” Not happy with this word for the day, the man flipped his Bible open to another page, where his eyes descended upon Luke 10:37, “And Jesus said to him, ‘You go, and do likewise.'”
— Kevin DeYoung, from Just Do Something, p. 82
If the good news is an invitation to a Jesus way of life and not information about somebody who accomplished something on my behalf, I’m sunk. This is law and no gospel.
— Kevin DeYoung, from Why We’re Not Emergent, p. 114
The problem with the myth of “the one” is that it assumes that affection is the glue that holds the marriage together, when really it is your commitment to marriage that safeguards the affection.
— Kevin DeYoung, from Just Do Something, p. 26
We know God has a plan for our lives. That’s wonderful. The problem is we think He’s going to tell us the wonderful plan before it unfolds. We feel like we can know—and need to know— what God wants every step of the way. But such preoccupation with finding God’s will, as well-intentioned as the desire may be, is more folly than freedom.
— Kevin DeYoung, from Just Do Something, p. 26
