Quotes from Joel Beeke

It is possible to be saved without assurance, but it is scarcely possible to be a healthy Christian without assurance.

Remember in the midst of your most grievous afflictions that the worst state of a believer is better than the best state of an unbeliever.

We put on God by putting on His armor. Christ Himself wore and made the armor, and the Holy Spirit fits it to us and makes it ours. We must fight through to the end until we hold the field against Satan. Then we must go on the offense, attacking him.

With their pens, and no less great with their swords—fearing God very much, and fearing men very little,—they were a generation of men who have never received from their country the honor that they deserve.

The Puritans, then, were not afraid to use the law of God as an instrument of evangelism. When God is about to play the chord of grace in the soul, they taught, he usually starts with the bass note of the law. In order for man to come to Christ, he must first come to an end of his own righteousness. "They held [that] the index of the soundness of a man's faith in Christ is the genuineness of the self-despair from which it springs," says Packer.

Thomas Goodwin said that "next to the Bible, he esteemed Dr. Ames, his Marrow of Divinity, as the best book in the world.