Faithfulness Amidst Challenges: Lessons from R.C. Sproul

I think I've been reflecting a lot recently on what the older writers call practical atheism, which means you profess to believe in God, but it doesn't really impact the fact that you are prayerless. And they often spoke about prayerlessness as a form of practical atheism. [00:04:34]

I think it's one of the paradoxes of real fruitfulness both in our own lives and in the life of the church that we only make a mark for eternity when we realize we have no power in and of ourselves to accomplish that, and that means our great need is to come to God and to beseech him to visit us. [00:05:22]

I do feel there may also be an absence of the sense of the presence of God, and I think that was something that R.C. felt very much and even from the point of view of the liturgy of the church. If you went to St. Andrews, you caught the sense that he longed to see that restored. [00:06:50]

What encourages me is, I think, to see so many younger people, partly because evangelicalism seems to be falling apart at the seams, and when you are younger, you long for somewhere that will help you to stand, and to see more and more young people, not only teenagers but 20s and 30s, really in so many different parts of the world. [00:07:37]

Turning to what we tend to think of by shorthand as the Reformed faith and discovering the riches of the gospel and also discovering the riches of the teachers of the Christian church from the past and in the present, that to me is tremendously encouraging because you get to a stage, I think, where you feel the big issue in your life becomes what, if anything, are you passing on to the coming generation. [00:08:17]

The more we are shaped by the world, the less impact we make on the world. You know, it's a very simple equation that if I am like you, then there is nothing about me that will leave an imprint on you. I think when it comes to issues of compromise, I often think, you know, I look back on my own Christian life. [00:13:24]

I think that I don't know how I learned this, but I learned as a teenager if I get hassle as a response, what I need to do is to whisper to the Lord Jesus, this is not about me, this is about you, and as long as I'm under your authority, you will take care of me. [00:15:11]

I think we are facing a new face of old-style totalitarianism, and we need to—this is why church history is so helpful to us. I think I've maybe in somewhere in a Ligonier book I told the story of the young man who told me it had this dream and in this dream all these great figures from church history were charging over the hill. [00:16:24]

There has always been a kind of totalitarianism seeking to squash and destroy genuine Christian faith. I think it may astonish friends in the United States of America, but unless you are willing to sign up to being an Anglican, that is, sign up to 39 articles and so on, which are fine in themselves, unless you were willing to do it, you could not graduate from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. [00:17:19]

One of the exciting things about being a Christian is, hey, you're actually living in the texture of the Bible, and this is the world it addresses, and it gives you everything you need to see you through this, but at a cost. And so some of the things that I remember as a youngster, people complaining were happening in the Soviet block. [00:19:01]

The cry for, you know, we want to be on the same level as these Christians who have dominated really masks the deep desire of our sinful hearts to master and overbear that Christianity. You read about it in the answer of the apostles and, as far as I can understand, the rest of the Bible. [00:19:52]

I think what I've found helpful to me is, not in order of precedence but in order of obviousness, one is the corporate worship of God, the ministry of the word, the praise of his name, the fellowship of the saints, the baptisms and reflecting on the significance of my own baptism. More and more, I think this is true of most ministers. [00:22:45]