Inspirational Quotes by D.A. Carson

“That God’s grace empowers our works destroys all mechanical merit theology: so much work, so much pay. At the end of the day, we work and serve with the end in view and constantly remember that if we are fruitful it is because God’s grace is at work within us.”

“In some ways the situation of the people described in these chapters mirrors our own: we live between the “already” and the “not yet,” between the glory of what God has already accomplished and what God has not yet done but has promised to do.”

“Read the Pentateuch as a whole: the final point is that Moses does not enter the land. Read the first seven books of the Old Testament: one cannot fail to see that the old covenant had not transformed the people. Canonically, that is an important lesson: the Law was never adequate to save and transform.”

“Postmodernism is an outlook that depends not a little on what are perceived to be the fundamental limitations on the power of interpretation: that is, since interpretation can never be more than my interpretation or our interpretation, no purely objective stance is possible.”

“We are already at the stage where many evangelical leaders simply assume the message of the cross but no longer lay much emphasis on it. Their focus is elsewhere.”

“IN THE MOST CRUCIAL EVENTS IN REDEMPTIVE HISTORY, God takes considerable pains to ensure that no one can properly conclude that these events have been brought about by human resolve or wit. They have been brought about by God himself—on his timing, according to his plan, by his means, for his glory—yet in interaction with his people. All of this falls out of Exodus 2:11-25.”

“But now in Isaiah 64, the prophet utters one of the most wrenching pleas found in Holy Scripture: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!” (64:1). That is the only hope we have: we cannot save ourselves. Nothing of our resolutions and gimmicks and religion will suffice. God himself must rend the heavens and come down. Isaiah is not denying God’s immanence; rather, he is saying that God must actively intervene on our behalf to save us, demonstrating his power once again, or we are lost.”

“Clearly, we have entered a world very different from the world of modernity as previously described. The subject/object distinction has broken down. In this world, foundationalism is a washout;49 the old distinction between fact and opinion is disappearing from view. The quest for certainty, precision, and ahistorical knowledge of objective truth is judged impossible. “Truth” is not an objective entity; the classic dikes between fact and opinion are springing leaks. Of course, not all the tenets of modernity have been sacrificed. Irrationally, philosophical naturalism (for most advocates of this radical hermeneutics), still holds sway; moreover, I must still say something about the place of science in this new model. But some variation of what once held the status of a minority report advanced only by a few intellectuals is now adopted almost everywhere.”

“This is both deliciously ironic and entirely appropriate. It is ironic because what the world dismisses with a shudder is nothing less than God’s means of bringing blessing the world”

“God may normally work through ordinary means. But he is not limited by them. That is why all the military muscle in the world cannot itself guarantee victory, and all the secularization, postmodernism, naturalism, and paganism in the world cannot by themselves prevent revival. Let God be God.”

“. What a remarkable notion! Paul does not say that these Christians have been called to suffer as well as to believe, but that it has been granted to them to suffer as well as to believe—as if both suffering for Christ and believing in Christ were blessed privileges that have been graciously granted. That, of course, is precisely what he means. We often think of faith as a gracious gift of God (Eph. 2:8-9), but suffering?”

“This is the time for Christians to be drumming home some fundamentals as part of our witness in the larger world. Whatever fine points we express or even fight over in our own Christian communities, on the larger scale we should be hammering away at a few basic points. It is painfully disappointing to find many clerics and Christian gurus, on the few occasions they find themselves asked for a Christian outlook on this or that question, unable to deliver themselves of more than a few ethical platitudes veneered with Christian vocabulary. We must constantly say that we were made by God and for him; that all of us will have to give an account to him; that our Creator is our Judge; that the grace we ourselves have received in Christ Jesus impels us to good works, but that our ultimate hope for the future is the end of history, a new heaven and a new earth that only God himself can bring about; that human hubris stands humbled not only before our individual deaths, but before the deaths of civilizations and finally of the world itself; that a society that does not recognize these points finally becomes grotesquely self-serving and exposed to the judgement of God.”

“We ruefully acknowledge how self-centered we are after we have had an argument with someone. Typically, we mentally conjure up a rerun of the argument, thinking up all the things we could have said, all the things we should have said. In such reruns, we always win. After an argument, have you ever conjured up a rerun in which you lost?”

“Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it” (Rev. 1:3).”

“(1) David’s initial appeal is to God’s faithfulness and righteousness (143:1). This is entirely appropriate, in exactly the same way that the goodness of a potentate or the integrity of a judge is welcomed by those trying to redress a wrong. The difficulty, of course, is that as we sinners appeal to the righteousness of God for vindication, it is easy to remember that we ourselves are horribly soiled compared with the clean glory of the unshielded holiness of the Almighty. Hence verse 2: David acknowledges that “no one living is righteous before you.” This is a tension not finally resolved until the cross (Rom. 3:21-26; cf. 1 John 1:9).”

“There is a second way in which God has “made foolish the wisdom of the world.” Granted that through God’s wise providence the world has not known him, God determined that some men and women would come to know him—but through a means utterly unexpected and unforeseen by the “wise” people of the world. “God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe” (1:21). We”

“The question to ask is this: Are all the “interpretations” listed here, not least the mutually contradictory ones, equally acceptable to God? An atheist will be uncomfortable with such a question; a Christian must ask it. Is it enough simply to hold the beliefs of one’s “Christian” community? How about the interpretive community of Jehovah’s Witnesses? Mormons? Or how about, say, Muslims? Buddhists? Materialist Marxists? I do not know how Smith would respond to such questions. If he draws the line somewhere, then of course I will ask him how he knows that is the place to draw it. At the very least he has then admitted the existence of objective truth, the denial of which is dangerous. If, in line with the central heritage of the Christian church, he ties that truth to the Bible, then one must push hard and ask which of the other interpretations can properly be justified and which must be ruled out by what the Bible says—or will he retreat again to some vague notion of equivalent value in all interpretations? If he denies that there is any way we can know that we are pleasing God, and that the best we can do is live in line with our interpretive communities, what possible excuse could he make for Luther breaking out of one community to start another? Was Luther right? How do we decide? If Smith hides behind the community in the face of such questions, then his interlocutor is basically right. And I would review with him the points I have already tried to make in this chapter and the previous one. In short, I agree that all our understanding is interpretive, and that the interpretive communities in which we find ourselves are extremely influential. But this does not mean, on the one hand, that we cannot articulate objective truth, and on the other that our interpretive communities bind us utterly.”

“Nothing makes clearer the ultimacy of grace than the doctrine of election. God did not have to save any. If he saved one, it would be a great act of grace. Here he saves a vast number of guilty people, out of his grace alone, having compassion on whom he will (9:15), as is his right (9:16-24).”

“. The crucial issue, of course, is not whether one is “progressive” or not, or a “traditionalist” or not: one could be a progressive in a good or a bad sense, and a traditionalist in a good or a bad sense. Such labels, by themselves, are frequently manipulative and rarely add much clarity to complex matters. The real issue is whether or not one is holding to the apostolic Gospel, whether or not one is continuing in the teaching of Christ. That is the perennial test.”

“individualism and personal choice in religion have largely displaced loyalty to denominational structures and to inherited doctrinal bastions. This makes it easier for individuals to be syncretistic, or, worse, confusedly pluralistic—i.e., people without strong doctrinal commitments may take on highly diverse and even incompatible ideas and fuse them in some way (syncretism), or they may take on highly diverse and even contradictory ideas without fusing them, simply letting them stand, unaware that the elementary demands of consistency are being violated.”