Richard D. Phillips Quotes & Sayings

We are not called to give lifestyle tips or the self-help plumbing that today's worldly men and women crave. The Bible says the gospel is the "power of God for salvation to everyone who believes." (Romans 1:16b), so we must proclaim it. — Richard D. Phillips

Christ... did not come on earth to be a conqueror or a philosopher, or a mere teacher of morality. He came to save sinners. He came to do that which man could never do for himself - to do that which money and learning can never obtain - to do that which is essential to man's real happiness. He came to 'take away sin'. — Richard D. Phillips

Our witness must center not on our experience but on the facts of Christ's coming to this world. — Richard D. Phillips

John Calvin said: "It is the nature of faith that we want to bring others to share eternal life with us when we have become partakers of it. The knowledge of God cannot lie buried and inactive in our hearts and not be made known to men."6
We — Richard D. Phillips

Salvation requires a radical revamping by which we are made inwardly new. J.C. Ryle explains, 'It is a thorough change of heart, will, and character. It is a resurrection. It is a new creation. It is a passing from death to life. It is the implanting of our death hearts of a new principle from above. — Richard D. Phillips

To be clear, male leadership in marriage does not mean the husband does everything or even that he decides everything. Rather, it means he typically initiates and always leads those shared discussions with his wife by which the various aspects of marriage and family life are decided and planned. The wife's opinion is vitally important, and a godly couple should be a close-knit team. But there should be no area of family life in which the husband does not serve as leader, facilitator, and overseer. — Richard D. Phillips

For our marriages to regain the love and unity God designed them to have, it is not merely a matter of wives submitting to their husbands in the Lord. Husbands, in fact, have the first and greatest responsibility. As we gain insight about our wives through our shared lives together and our attentive
and cherishing interest in the affairs of their hearts, we must nourish our wives with God's Word, and with our own encouraging and upbuilding words informed by Scripture. — Richard D. Phillips

Our calling in life really is this simple (although not therefore easy): We are to devote ourselves to working/building and keeping/protecting everything placed into our charge. — Richard D. Phillips

In our witness, we are to shine not our own light but Christ's light. Just as a lamp requires oil, we depend on our fellowship with Christ and the Holy Spirit's enlivening ministry through God's Word in order that Christ's light may shine through us. — Richard D. Phillips

Love between a man and a woman simply cannot work without love for God at the center of the relationship; by means of his curses, God mercifully brings — Richard D. Phillips

One of the striking testimonies of the truthfulness of the Bible as God's revelation is its coherence. Authors separated by centuries of history and remarkably different cultures are all saying fundamentally the same message: God alone brings life to people caught up in death, and God alone brings life through a ransom paid, a ransom paid by a substitute so that the one whom God is bringing to life might live. — Richard D. Phillips

Of all men, Christians should work especially hard, giving more than an honest day's work for a day's wage. — Richard D. Phillips

So what is true religion? What does real spirituality look like? First, it is a desire for God himself, for his pleasure and his glory; second, it is concerned with the inner realities of sin and righteousness and only then with consequences and external blessings; third, true spirituality is that which draws from God's Word, hearing and believing and doing according to what God has spoken in the Bible. — Richard D. Phillips

A. W. Pink rightly says:
Humility is not the product of direct cultivation, rather it is a by-product. The more I try to be humble, the less shall I attain unto humility. But if I am truly occupied with that One who was "meek and lowly in heart," if I am constantly beholding His glory in the mirror of God's Word, then shall I be "changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor. 3:18).24 — Richard D. Phillips

Believing in Christ is the world's great need, and our great obligation is to tell all people that they need to do so. — Richard D. Phillips

If we think of the atonement as a bridge spanning a great river, Arminians see it as infinitely wide, but not reaching all the way to the far bank; Calvinists hold that the atonement is a narrow bridge, wide enough only for the elect, but reaching all the way to the other side. We believe that Christ's death actually saves those for whom He died. — Richard D. Phillips

I may ... pass for being a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets-that's fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue-that's success. Furnished with money and a little fame ... [I] may partake of trendy diversions-that's pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote ... represented a serious impact on our time-that's fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing-less than nothing, a positive impediment-measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty.8 — Richard D. Phillips

Indeed, this is what modern and postmodern masculinity has been all about-men behaving like little boys forever, serving themselves in the name of self-discovery. (Can we imagine someone like Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill talking about going on a quest to find his masculine self? They were too busy changing the world.) — Richard D. Phillips

any Christian man who wants to serve the Lord, in any role and at any level, must begin by devoting himself to God's Word. A man who is weak in the Word of God will be of little use for service, for we cannot truly serve God effectively in our own knowledge and strength. But God's Word stirs up in us the faith and spiritual strength needed to serve Him. — Richard D. Phillips