Strong Words and Smooth Seas [R.C. quotes from the Ligonier Cruise]

"I think we have a tendency as Christians to underestimate the power of that natural corruption in our hearts. I tell people the most basic sin of the human race is the proclivity for idolatry - for exchanging the truth of God for a lie. And regeneration does not cure that instantly. We have to fight it as long as we live.
We still have people today who profess to be Christians, who say they love Jesus, but they discount a ton of what God reveals about Himself in Scripture. They choke on sovereignty. They don't want to hear about the wrath of God. They don't want to hear about the justice of God. And yet they say, 'I love God.' But the god they love has been stripped of his scary and uncomfortable attributes. And that's idolatry. And all of us to some extent still engage in discounting the full nature of God from our thinking. Because if we really deal with God in the fullness of His holiness and of His sovereignty, we'd be on our face all the time before him.
If I say to people, 'God loves you unconditionally' and they are not Christians, what do they hear? That means: 'God's gonna love me no matter what I do. I don't have to repent. I don't have to come to Christ. I can keep on sinning and that's not going to affect God's love for me. Because God's love is unconditional.'
That's scary stuff. That's not the God of Scripture. The God of Scripture hates your sin. And when it comes to the divine judgment, He's not gonna' send your sin to Hell. He's going to send you there, okay?
But I talk to a lot of people, and the little old lady will say to me, 'But my God is a God of love.' And I'll say, 'Well where'd you ever get the idea that God was a God of love? From Iraq? From Vietnam? From the cancer ward in the hospital? From the ghetto in Los Angelos or New York? Is that where you learned God was a God of love? No, I'll tell you where you learned that God was a God of love - from the pages of the Scriptures. The same source that tells you He's holy; and that He's righteous; and that He's a God of wrath and a God of judgment. But we come to the Bible like it was a smorgasbord and you take your plate like we're at the Ledo, and you take a little grace and a little mercy and a little love, and you leave the holiness and the justice and the sovereignty there because you don't like that. That's what we do. I mean, we all do that. And we reconstruct a God that we can live with. That's our most basic sinful tendency. But we have to fight against that as long as we live."

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"W.C. Fields began to read the Bible on his deathbed and someone said, ‘W.C., what are you doing?’
He replied, ‘I’m looking for loopholes.’
So there are legalists like that. But let me tell you what being legalistic isn’t. It’s not being legalistic to obey the law of God. And so often, people who are Christians, who are earnestly trying to be obedient Christians, and genuinely seek to be in conformity to the law of God and obey God are accused of legalism by those who are less than scrupulous about giving obedience to God. Now the pendulum swings either way. There are times where the church gets very legalistic in the negative sense and obscures grace and mercy and all the rest. But that’s not where we are now. The big problem in the church today is not legalism, it’s antinomianism.
Though the law doesn’t save us, the law reveals to us what is pleasing to God. And the Christian heart is a heart that should seek to do that which is pleasing to God. Jesus put it very simply: ‘If you love me, keep My commandments.’ But we have this cheap grace in our day. We even have a ghastly, ghastly doctrine of the ‘carnal Christian’. You can’t find it anywhere in sacred Scripture. I’m telling you that’s designed so we do evangelism and people make a profession of faith and then the next day they’re no different than they were the day before and we want to count them and say, ‘Well, they made their profession of faith!’ Well, profession of faith never saved anybody - it’s the possession of faith. And your works won’t save you, but it is impossible to have true faith - converted faith - without a changed life. Your sanctification begins the very second you’re converted or you haven’t been converted."

- R.C. Sproul [from Q & A #1 of The Providence of God Alaskan Cruise 2005]