Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Dever

Unbelief is like gravity, it's always pulling down on the authority of Scripture.

A healthy church is not a church that's perfect and without sin. It has not figured everything out. Rather, it's a church that continually strives to take God's side in the battle against the ungodly desires and deceits of the world, our flesh, and the devil. It's a church that continually seeks to conform itself to God's Word.

Avoiding the doctrine of Hell is one step away from denying it altogether.

For a Christian, our fears about the future are rooted in those places where our will differs from God's will.

Our examples of enduring hardship are often more powerful than our stories of success and triumph.

A gospel that in no way offends the sinner has not been understood.

By the grace of God I am what I am

When a person becomes a Christian, he doesn’t just join a local church because it’s a good habit for growing in spiritual maturity. He joins a local church because it’s the expression of what Christ has made him—a member of the body of Christ.

I heard about a pastor in a church of 5,000 people who employed two seminary students whose main responsibility was to get four new people baptized each week. When asked, "What happens if they can't meet the quota?", his response was, "Then I'll find two students who can". This man wasn't even remotely interested in true gospel preaching. He was results-driven.

If joy or urgency are missing from our presentation of the gospel, then our testimony to Christ will be missing that sort of fullness that we find in the New Testament.

If you are not offending people, then you are not an evangelist.

T]he church is not a place. It's not a building. It's not a preaching point. It's not a spiritual service provider. It's a people - the new covenant, blood-bought people of God. That's why Paul said, 'Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her' (Eph. 5:25). He didn't give himself up for a place, but for a people.

Evangelism is not simply looking at someone and saying, "Look, you have to become a Christian". Instead, an evangelist tells us the truth about who God is, and explains where we stand as a result of that. People can ignore us - indeed, they have every legal right to do so.

God's eternal plan has always been to display his glory not just through individuals but through a corporate body.

I love Iain Murray's definition of worldliness: towards the end of Evangelicalism Divided, he says that worldliness consists of loving idols and being at war with God. I think that's true in the lives of too many professing Christians today.

We do live best in this world when we keep the next in mind.

From the time of Cain until the last believer before Christ's return, we are all fundamentally in the same boat. We suffer the same spiritual afflictions and tendencies.

We should want to evangelize because of the joy that God puts in our hearts. Ultimately, that's the best reason for sharing our faith.

Worldliness in the church is a lot more pervasive than a lack of passion for evangelism. Nevertheless, one of the results of worldliness is a waning enthusiasm for evangelism.

We mustn't be content to just sit around pointing out the errors in others; we actually need to be sharing the gospel and praying for people to be converted.

Prayer is the preview of God's action.

Our culture is becoming more hostile to the gospel. This trend may be more established in Australia than in the USA, but it's now certainly the case that the postmodern mindset is dominant, particularly in the media. Therefore, when we start speaking in terms of certainties, we sound scary to other people.

I'll tell you what's more important than all the commentaries in your library: prayer.

The gospel of Christ has never needed the gimmicks of man to effect conversion in the soul

We are called to love others. We share the gospel because we love people. And we don't share the gospel because we don't love people. Instead, we wrongly fear them. We don't want to cause awkwardness. We want their respect, and after all, we figure, if we try to share the gospel with them, we'll look foolish! And so we are quiet. We protect our pride at the cost of their souls. In the name of not wanting to look weird, we are content to be complicit in their being lost.

Your plans are fine, as long as you realize God has the right to change them.

A church is not a Fortune 500 company. It's not simply another nonprofit organization, nor is it a social club. In fact, a healthy church is unlike any organization that man has ever devised, because man didn't devise it.

We do not fail in our evangelism if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not subsequently converted; we fail only if we do not faithfully tell the gospel at all.

If you need wisdom and guidance, then pray to the Lord to guide you.

Indeed, some secularists are so worried about Christianity, they think Christians are about as dangerous as Muslim terrorists. They get really worried when we don't invest our lives in this-worldly concerns. They look on us as unpredictable free agents. When we reject their relativism and make absolutist spiritual claims, they look at us as nervously as they would a terrorist with a suicide bomb strapped to his back. Of course, Christians are not into coercion in any form. But it is very hard to persuade secularists of that.

The truly changed, truly converted, truly Christian heart can say with John Newton, “I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I wish to be. I am not what I hope to be. Yet I can truly say, I am not what I once was. By the grace of God, I am what I am.

Correct division should be preferred over corrupt unity.

We live in a time when people are increasingly skittish about evangelism - Christians and non-Christians alike. People are suspicious of evangelism, and misunderstand it, which contributes to our reluctance to share the gospel. When you add our fear of others' reactions as well as our natural laziness to the equation, it's not hard to see why we make such little progress in sharing our faith.

Today is what the Lord has prepared you for.

Sin claims to free but in fact it kills.

God can use even stray, honest comments to bring people to himself.

Every believer should evangelize. I know some Christians think that evangelism is only for people with special gifts for it, but I don't believe the New Testament teaches that. While Paul does say that some believers have the call to be evangelists, all of us have the responsibility of evangelism.

According to the New Testament, the church is primarily a body of people who profess and give evidence that they have been saved by God's grace alone, for His glory alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Sometimes we have to wait a long time to see conversions.

Our fears lie to us about how important they are.

There is simply so much reason to believe the good news of Jesus Christ in history, in Scripture, as well as in our own experience that it would take a leap of faith not to believe in the gospel.

I love people thinking about apologetics. I just think that we have to be careful. We need to realize that we can argue about evolution or the existence of God or any number of things, but until we tell people the message of the cross, we have not evangelized them.

Suffering can serve us. Suffering tests our trust in God's promises. And we have a great interest in knowing the truth about our trust in Him.

Pride causes us to care more about what our non-Christian friends think of us than what God will do to them in their sin.

Evangelism is not imposing anything on anyone; it is simply sharing the truth.

Christian proclamation might make the gospel audible, but Christians living together in local congregations make the gospel visible (see John 13:34-35). The church is the gospel made visible.

Forgetfulness of God's grace is one of the greatest tools in the enemy's war against our souls.

The more you come to know the Bible - both in reading it extensively and also meditating on it deeply - the more integrated your understanding of all of life will be. And this means that there will be fewer steps between what you are doing at work and sharing your faith in Christ.

If you have no interest in actually committing yourself to an actual group of gospel-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, you might question whether you belong to the body of Christ at all!

As long as quick numerical growth remains the primary indicator of church health, the truth will be compromised. Instead, churches must once again begin measuring success not in terms of numbers but in terms of fidelity to the Scriptures.

Do you want to know that your new life is real? Commit yourself to a local group of saved sinners. Try to love them. Don’t just do it for three weeks. Don’t just do it for six months. Do it for years. And I think you’ll find out, and others will, too, whether or not you love God. The truth will show itself

The church arises only from the gospel. And a distorted church usually coincides with a distorted gospel.

The church is the gospel made visible.

Christians are defined not by our heritage, but by our mission; not by our blood, but by His.

Membership is the church's corporate endorsement of a person's salvation.

God’s Word has always been His chosen instrument to create, convict, convert, and conform His people.

Friend, the church finds its life as it listens to the Word of God. It finds its purpose as it lives out and displays the Word of God. The church’s job is to listen and then to echo.

I recognize that not all of us may have the same abilities and talents in sharing the gospel. But I want to keep the heat on all of us for getting the good news out there.

Once we see more of our need and understand more of what Christ has done for us, he will become more precious to us. And this, in turn, will enable our obedience far more than sheer grunt effort.

We are all called to initiate involvement in each other’s lives... We covenant together to work and pray for unity, to walk together in love, to exercise care and watchfulness over each other, to faithfully admonish and entreat one another as occasion may require, to assemble together, to pray for each other, to rejoice and to bear with each other, and to pray for God’s help in all this.