Top 126 Quotes & Sayings by D. A. Carson

I do think that there is a hunger in the land for a vision of confessional Christianity that is robust, God-centered, tough-minded, able to address today and tomorrow and the next day, and comprehensive.

There needs to be a place in the church or just outside - there needs to be a place where people feel free to ask questions without being put upon, where they feel free to ask difficult, challenging questions to voice their skepticism.

No one believes more strongly than I do that every Christian should be a theologian. In that sense, we all need to work it out. I want all Christians who can read, to read their Bibles and to read beyond the Bible - to read the history and theology.

God is a talking God, and thus you must come to wrestle with him. You must wrestle with what he said.

The Gospel itself is angular. It always has been. It always conflicts. It always challenges every generation. It challenges different generations in different ways.

How much would our churches be transformed if each of us made it a practice to thank God for others and then to tell those others what it is about them that we thank God for?

We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray.

The cliché, God hates the sin but love the sinner, is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and on the sinner (John 3:36).

To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.

Do you wish to see God's love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God's wrath? Look at the cross.

The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it.

If the text is God's Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience.

Jesus is hungry but feeds others; He grows weary but offers others rest; He is the King Messiah but pays tribute; He is called the devil but casts out demons; He dies the death of a sinner but comes to save His people from their sins; He is sold for thirty pieces of silver but gives His life a ransom for many; He will not turn stones to bread for Himself but gives His own body as bread for people.

Prayer is God's appointed means for appropriating the blessings that are ours in Christ Jesus.

A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen.

We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb.

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher's sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity.

The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin

Love the church because Jesus loves it.

Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back.

Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.

It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.

A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross.

...sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances, rather than change our circumstances.

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.

We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.

If you want to see what judgment looks like, go to the cross. If you want to see what love looks like, go to the cross.

What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus' sake.

If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.

Wrath, unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God's holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath-but there will always be love in God. Where God in His holiness confronts His image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the jealous God He claims to be, and His holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God's wrath is diminishing God's holiness.

God's love in John 3:16 is not amazing because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad.

Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.

A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.

When you are converted, you want to do what you didn't want to do before, and you don't want to do what you wanted to do before. There's a change in the heart; there's a cleaning up, a change in orientation, and holiness becomes attractive, instead of something you have to put up with to figure out what you can get away with. As long as young people are asking, 'Can I get away with this?' or 'Can I get away with that?' I wonder if they're regenerate. If they're asking, instead, 'How can I grow in holiness?' then I suspect they've begun to understand.

God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never mitigates human responsibility.

A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.

Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship, worship rather than worship God.

Draw nigh to God, so that you may dread the grave as little as your bed. Draw nigh to God, that you may live a happy and useful life. Drawing nigh to God is the most concentrated energy of the soul. Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.

The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.

The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross.

The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better.

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

Sex is about timing. The world says: any time, any place. God says: my time, my place.

All of us would be wiser if we would resolve never to put people down, except on our prayer lists.

The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.

Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.

You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.

Effectiveness in teaching the Bible is purchased at the price of much study, some of it lonely, all of it tiring.

It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.

The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God's story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible.

In any Christian view of life, self-fulfillment must never be permitted to become the controlling issue. The issue is service, the service of real people. The question is, 'How can I be most useful?', not, 'How can I feel most useful?'

To worship God 'in spirit and in truth' is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows are being swept away (Hebrews 8:13). Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship.

Either worrying drives out prayer, or prayer drives out worrying.

True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us

To assume the gospel in one generation is to lose it in the next.

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced.

Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.

The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.

Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God's love, they cannot escape the cross.