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sunday notes and quotes

"The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. The man who has accepted it has certified that God is truthful. For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.  Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him."  (John 3:31-36 NIV)


“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.”  (C. S. Lewis)


"Jesus is excellent in his origin: he is from God; Jesus is excellent in his words: he speaks God’s words, and Jesus is excellent in his power: He acts with God’s power and authority through the Holy Spirit. He is very God of very God, as the Nicene Creed reminds us:  'I believe…in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man...'"  (David Kingston)


“Belief is obedience to the utterance of God; disobedience is unbelief. Belief is thus defined as commitment to authority rather than a passive opinion.”  (Merrill Tenney)


"He must become greater; I must become less."  (John 3:30 NIV)


“When I am gone, don’t talk about William Carey; talk about William Carey’s Savior. I desire that Christ alone might be magnified.”   (William Carey, Baptist missionary to China, as he lay dying)


"Based on today’s passage we can say that believing in Jesus means at least three things:
--First and foremost it means to believe with all our being the key truths about him: that he is God and that he paid the price for our sins on the cross and that he rose from the dead.
--Secondly it follows that this belief will turn into grateful worship of him as our Lord and our God.
--Thirdly, as we see from John’s example, it means that we will gladly serve him and his body, which is the church. In so doing, we will look to make much of Jesus and little of ourselves."  (David Kingston)



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