Top 352 Quotes & Sayings by R. C. Sproul - Page 5

If the being of God ceased for one second, the universe would disappear.

The presumptuous sin of Uzzah was that He assumed his hands were less polluted than the dirt.

The house that is built upon the sand will crumble at the first sign of a windstorm.

Seeking God? We have totally revised corporate worship services to be sensitive to "seekers." If worship were to be tailored for seekers, it would be directed exclusively to believers, for no one except believers ever seeks God (Rom. 3:9-12).

The gospel is the proclamation of the person and work of Jesus Christ and how those benefits can be applied to us by faith alone.

This means that if a person fulfills his or her vocation as a steelmaker, attorney, or homemaker coram Deo, then that person is acting every bit as religiously as a soul-winning evangelist who fulfills his vocation. It means that David was as religious when he obeyed God’s call to be a shepherd as he was when he was anointed with the special grace of kingship. It means that Jesus was every bit as religious when He worked in His father’s carpenter shop as He was in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Prayer is not optional for the Christian; it is required.

The only way the kingdom of God is going to be manifest in this world before Christ comes is if we manifest it by the way we live as citizens of heaven and subjects of the King.

Just as the normative standard for the good and for the true is God, so the ultimate standard of beauty is God.

Any conception of a god that is less than sovereign is an idol and no god at all.

We are not doomed to an ultimate conflict with no hope of resolution. The message of the Scripture is one of victory - full, final and ultimate victory. It is not our doom that is certain, but Satan's. His head has been crushed by the heel of Christ, who is the Alpha and Omega.

The more sanctified a person is the more heavily weighted his prayer time is in adoration.

For the soul of a person to be inflamed with passion for the living God, that person's mind must first be informed about the character and will of God. There can be nothing in the heart that is not first in the mind. Though it is possible to have theology on the head without its piercing the soul, it cannot pierce the soul without first being grasped by the mind.

Whenever I read the psalms, I feel like I am eavesdropping on a saint having a personal conversation with God.

If I know anything about the character of God after fifty years of ministry, I know that God hates abortion.

Modern man has lost any sense of God's nearness, but Christianity teaches that God reveals himself through every single thing he has ever brought into being, whether a created object or historical event.

We experience the grace of an infinite God, but grace is not infinite.

God Himself supplies the necessary condition to come to Jesus, that's why it is 'sola gratia,' by grace alone, that we are saved.

When you feel depressed, it helps to actively change your environment. Go and do something different. Martin Luther conquered his depression by going outside to work in his garden. Surprisingly enough, one of the best ways to handle depression is to go to work immediately on the task you least enjoy. (The chances are your depression is caused by guilt feelings arising out of neglect of those tasks.)

I think Arminianism is death to Christianity!

For a work to be considered good it must not only conform outwardly to the law of God, but it must be motivated inwardly by a sincere love for God.

Apostasy occurs when a church leaves its historic moorings, abandons its historic confessional position, and degenerates into a state where either essential Christian truths are blatantly denied or the denial of such truths is widely tolerated.

It's dangerous to assume that because a man is drawn to holiness in his study that he is thereby a holy man. I am sure that the reason that I have a deep hunger to learn of the holiness of God is precisely because I am not holy.

This little expression, 'It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're sincere,' is a monstrous lie.

Unbelievers can tolerate Christ only as long as He is stripped of His real identity.

It is imperative that the Christian, at the beginning of his pursuit to understand what true worship is, gets it clear that the object of our worship is to be God and God alone.

When the gospel is at stake, everything is at stake.

God’s sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it.

We tend to have mixed feelings about the holy. There is a sense in which we are at the same time attracted to it and repulsed by it. Something draws us toward it, while at the same time we want to run away from it. We can’t seem to decide which way we want it. Part of us yearns for the holy, while part of us despises it. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it.

We take comfort, however, that mystery is not a synonym for contradiction.

Faith is the means by which the righteousness of Christ is given to us.

When God issues a call to us, it is always a holy call. The vocation of dying is a sacred vocation. To understand that is one of the most important lessons a Christian can ever learn. When the summons comes, we can respond in many ways. We can become angry, bitter or terrified. But if we see it as a call from God and not a threat from Satan, we are far more prepared to cope with its difficulties.

We are able to persevere only because God works within us, within our free wills. And because God is at work in us, we are certain to persevere. The decrees of God concerning election are immutable. They do not change, because He does not change. All whom He justifies He glorifies. None of the elect has ever been lost.

We live in a time of crisis in the secular culture and in the church with regard to the beautiful.

God's graciousness is not totally removed from any individual during this lifetime. In hell, it is.

The moment we think we deserve mercy a little alarm bell should go off in our head because we are not talking about mercy anymore but justice.

To call a Christian a theist is roughly equivalent to calling the space shuttle Atlantis a glider.

I'll retire when they pry my cold, dead fingers off of my Bible.

There are times when we suffer innocently at other people’s hands. When that occurs, we are victims of injustice. But that injustice happens on a horizontal plane. No one ever suffers injustice on the vertical plane. That is, no one ever suffers unjustly in terms of his or her relationship with God. As long as we bear the guilt of sin, we cannot protest that God is unjust in allowing us to suffer.

A Christian is not a skeptic. A Christian is a person with a burning heart, a heart set aflame with certainty of the resurrection.

It is important that when we are engaged in admonition or exhortation or confrontation with a brother who is overcome in sin, we call attention to the truth in an extraordinarily compassionate and tender and loving spirit.

The great triad of enemies for Christian growth contain the world, the flesh, and the devil.

At the final judgment, everyone will stand before God alone.

The very heart of worship, as the Bible makes clear, is the business of expressing, from the depths of our spirits, the highest possible honor we can offer before God.

What higher approval could a person enjoy than to know that what he or she has done is pleasing to God?

All that God had to do to harden Pharaoh's heart, or to harden your heart, is to withhold His own grace.

Before I can call upon Christ as my Savior, I have to understand that I need a savior. I have to understand that I am a sinner. I have to have some understanding of what sin is.I have to understand that God exists. I have to understand that I am estranged from that God, and that I am exposed to that God's judgment. I don't reach out for a savior unless I am first convinced that I need a savior. All of that is pre-evangelism. It is involved in the data or the information that a person has to process with his mind before he can either respond to it in faith or reject it in unbelief.

When you enter the voting booth, don't leave your Christianity in the parking lot.

God is not blind; neither is He capricious. For Him there are no accidents. With God there are no cases of chance events.

We have a generation of people who think they can stand before the judgment seat of God despite their sins.

Once we are reconciled to God, the estrangement is over, the hostilities have ended, and the peace is sealed for eternity.

The power of the gospel is the word of God . . . nobody needs a gospel if there’s no judgment, or law, if God is not a God of judgment. If there is no such thing as hell, what good is the gospel?

To focus our mind on the task at hand-with fierce concentration-m akes for a productive use of time.

The issue of faith is not so much whether we believe in God, but whether we believe the God we believe in. (p.35)

Without the gospel, a gathering of people, though they claim otherwise, cannot be an authentic church.

Without God man has no reference point to define himself. 20th century philosophy manifests the chaos of man seeking to understand himself as a creature with dignity while having no reference point for that dignity.

The truth of Scripture is meant not only to be studied-it’s meant also to be sung.

We persevere because we are preserved by our High Priest's intercession.

It’s dangerous to assume that because a person is drawn to holiness in his study that he is thereby a holy man. There is irony here. I am sure that the reason I have a deep hunger to learn of the holiness of God is precisely because I am not holy. I am a profane man—a man who spends more time out of the temple than in it. But I have had just enough of a taste of the majesty of God to want more. I know what it means to be a forgiven man and what it means to be sent on a mission. My soul cries for more. My soul needs more.

The whole concept of providence is that God knows everything about what we do.