Superficial Truth

There are only too many of us who are disposed to grasp at the most superficial interpretation of Christian truth, and lazily to rest ourselves in that.  A creed which has no depth in it is like a picture which has no distance.  It is flat and unnatural, and self-condemned by the very fact.  ~Alexander MacLaren, The Disciple’s Confession and the Master’s Warning

We do not know the use of the sword until we are in battle.  Until the shipwreck comes, no man puts on the lifebelt in his cabin.  Every one of us has large tracts of Christian truth which we think we most surely believe, but which need experience to quicken them, and need us to grow up into the possession of them.  Of all our teachers who turn beliefs assented into beliefs really believed none is so mighty as sorrow; for that makes a man lay a firm hold on the deep things of God’s Word.  ~Alexander MacLaren, The Disciple’s Confession and the Master’s Warning

The only infallible interpreter of what we see in nature or know innately in our own consciences is the explicit revelation of Scripture. Since Scripture is also the one place where we are given the way of salvation, entrance into the kingdom of God, and an infallible account of Christ, the Bible is the touchstone to which all truth claims should be brought and by which all other truth must finally be measured. ~John MacArthur, The Truth War