Quotes from Mark Dever

The Word is so central and so instrumental because the Word of the Lord holds out the object of our faith to us. It presents God's promise to us—from all kinds of individual promises (throughout the Bible) all the way to the great promise, the great hope, the great object of our faith, Christ himself. The Word presents that which we are to believe.

Giving preachers advice on how to prepare sermons is a little like telling them what "their drink" should be at Starbucks.

A preacher can always improve, no matter how gifted he is.

God created the church, we have said, so that it might increasingly reflect the character of God as it's been revealed in his Word. In keeping with the storyline of the entire Bible, then, church discipline is the act of excluding an individual who carelessly brings disrepute onto the gospel and shows no commitment to doing otherwise.

A healthy church is a congregation that increasingly reflects God's character as his character has been revealed in his Word.

the most basic level of commitment by a Christian to his church is surprisingly substantial.

This book attempts to provide such careful instruction so that we might understand and recover faithfulness to God's Word on something that is not essential for salvation but that is both important and necessary for obedience—what the local church is to be and to do.

As in every other topic, our regular practice as Christians should be to seek God's will in his Word, either by explicit command or by reasoning from principles in the Word. We want to see that the answer is in the Bible.

By direct command, example, implication, or principles, God's Word tells us everything we need to know about every aspect of following him in life—from dating to marriage, from working to grieving, from evangelizing to eating. What should churches do? The answer is in the Bible.

not the writings that come from prophets inspired by the one true God revealed in Jesus Christ, then why do we find those passages as proof of who Jesus is?" In other words, they turned the old argument that had been used in the context of Jewish evangelism around. It's not

In many ways a church is simply a group of people who are living lives of love (John 13:34—35) because they all agree on how they have been loved in Christ.

In Scripture, God tells us how we should approach him in public worship. We read the Bible, sing the Bible, preach the Bible, pray the Bible, and see the Bible (in baptism and the Lord's Supper).