Top 160 Quotes & Sayings by John Stott

Never use a gallon of words to express a spoonful of thought. Our unadorned word should be enough.

No man preaches his sermon well to others if he does not first preach it to his own heart.

Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from His fruit, and no effective witness without His power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.

An unchurched christian is a grotesque anomaly. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God's new community.

Christians who neglect the Bible simply do not mature.

We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.

Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony

We need to repent of the haughty way in which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under its judgments instead. If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God's, then indeed he will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.

Christianity is in its very essence a resurrection religion. The concept of resurrection lies at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed.

As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.

Here's how to determine God's will for your life: Go wherever your gifts will be exploited the most.

The authority by which the Christian leader leads is not power but love, not force but example, not coercion but reasoned persuasion. Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.

Truth without love is too hard; love without truth is too soft.

Faith's only function is to receive what grace offers.

Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his.

Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, 'I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.' Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross.

When we look at the cross we see the justice, love, wisdom and power of God. It is not easy to decide which is the most luminously revealed, whether the justice of God in judging sin, or the love of God in bearing the judgment in our place, or the wisdom of God in perfectly combining the two, or the power of God in saving those who believe. For the cross is equally an act, and therefore a demonstration, of God’s justice, love, wisdom and power. The cross assures us that this God is the reality within, behind and beyond the universe.

The church is under orders. Evangelistic inactivity is disobedience.

Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.

It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.

Faith, Hope & Love. Faith is directed towards God, love towards others (both within the Christian fellowship and beyond it) and hope towards the future, in particular, the glorious coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Similarly, faith rests of the past; love works in the present; hope looks to the future. Every Christian without exception is a believer, a lover and a hoper. Faith, hope and love are three sure evidences of regeneration by the Holy Spirit.

Our Christian life began not with our decision to follow Christ but with God's call to us to do so.

Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.

The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God's will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.

Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and checkered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture .

We should not ask, ‘What is wrong with the world?’ for that diagnosis has already been given. Rather we should ask, “What has happened to salt and light?

The chief reason people do not know God is not because He hides from them but because they hide from Him.

God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us.

Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it.

Do we claim to believe in God? He's a missionary God. You tell me you're committed to Christ. He's a missionary Christ. Are you filled with the Holy Spirit? He's a missionary Spirit. Do you belong to the church? It's a missionary society. And do you hope to go to heaven when you die? It's a heaven into which the fruits of world mission have been and will be gathered.

Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.

The Spirit of God leads the people of God to submit to the Word of God.

God has clothed His thoughts in words, and there is no way to know Him except by knowing the Scriptures.

We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.

What we need is not more learning, not more eloquence, not more persuasion, not more organization, but more power from the Holy Spirit.

If the first mark of a true and living church is love, the second is suffering. The one is naturally consequent on the other. A willingness to suffer proves the genuineness of love.

We should travel light and live simply. Our enemy is not possessions but excess.

Simplicity is the first cousin of contentment.

Prayer is the very way God Himself has chosen for us to express our conscious need of Him and our humble dependence on Him.

The cross is not just a badge to identify us...it is also the compass which gives us our bearings in a disoriented world.

Christian giving is to be marked by self-sacrifice and self-forgetfuln ess, not by self-congratula tion.

All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousn ess, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.

Don't neglect your critical faculties. Remember that God is a rational God, who has made us in His own image. God invites and expects us to explore His double revelation, in nature and Scripture, with the minds He has given us, and to go on in the development of a Christian mind to apply His marvellous revealed truth to every aspect of the modern and post-modern world.

God intends us to penetrate the world. Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad. And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves? One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad. It cannot do anything else. The real question to ask is: Where is the salt?

Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.

For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God [Gen. 3:1-7], while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man [2 Cor. 5:21]. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.

At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgment we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God's holy love was 'satisfied.'

At every step of our Christian development and in every sphere of our Christian discipleship, pride is the greatest enemy and humility our greatest friend.

We have the means of evangelizing our country, but they are slumbering in the pews of our churches.

Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fiber of Christianity. Why is it that those who have no biblical convictions or theology to govern and direct their actions are tolerated and the standard or truth of God's Word rightly divided and applied is dismissed as extreme opinion or legalism?

Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service. If we do not use the mind that God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riches of God’s grace.

The gospel is NOT preached if Christ is not preached.

Because in no other person but the historic Jesus of Nazareth has God become man and lived a human life on earth, died to bear the penalty of our sins, and been raised from death and exalted to glory, there is no other Savior, for there is no other person who is qualified to save.

We are sent into the world, like Jesus, to serve. For this is the natural expression of our love for our neighbors. We love. We go. We serve.

Scripture is the royal scepter by which King Jesus rules his church

A Christian should resemble a fruit tree with real fruit, not a Christmas tree with decorations tied on

Greatness in the kingdom of God is measured in terms of obedience.

Pride is more than the first of the seven deadly sins; it is itself the essence of all sin.

A man who loves his wife will love her letters and her photographs because they speak to him of her. So if we love the Lord Jesus, we shall love the Bible because it speaks to us of him.

Saving faith is resting faith, the trust which relies entirely on the Savior.