Inspirational Quotes by John Stott
“One of the most urgent needs in the church of God today is a recovery of the simple biblical truth that the Christian life is a life of faith in response to God’s Word. Faith feeds on the promises of God and grows healthy and strong by them.”
“The spirit of our age is hostile toward people who state their opinions clearly and hold them strongly.”
“Thus the gospel creates the church, which spreads the gospel, which creates more churches, which in their turn spread the gospel further.”
“Everyone who has been truly set free by Jesus Christ expresses liberty in these three ways, first in self-control, next in loving service of our neighbor, and third in obedience to the law of God.”
“Christian liberty is freedom not to indulge the flesh but to control the flesh, freedom not to exploit our neighbor but to serve our neighbor, freedom not to disregard the law but to fulfill the law.”
“It is true that ever since the first disobedience in the Garden of Eden fallen human beings have been running away from God. Indeed, we are worse than fugitives; we are rebels who defy his authority and resist his love. And yet we are restless in our rebellion. Instinctively we know that the God we are trying to avoid is our only home. So at times we “feel after him.” We seek to find him whom we are simultaneously seeking to escape. Such is the paradox of our fallenness.”
“Jesus evidently thought that human beings still retained a residue of their former glory.”
“So then, according to Jesus, the ‘evils’ which we think, say and do are not due primarily to our environment, nor are they bad habits picked up from bad teaching, bad company or bad example; they are due to the inward corruption of our heart.”
“There is no value in the reading of Scripture for its own sake, but only if it effectively introduces us to Jesus Christ.”
“We need to emphasize that what the Spirit speaks he speaks through what has already been spoken, and that what the Spirit does he does through what has already been done.”
“The teachers of the law not only attempted to extend the law’s permissions; they also tried to restrict the law’s uncomfortable commands. For example, God’s law said ‘love your neighbour’. Tradition interpreted the word ‘neighbour’ narrowly, applying it only to a fellow-Israelite, or even simply to a friend.”
“But when the teaching of the Bible is plain, then continuing to maintain an open mind is a sign not of maturity, but of immaturity.”
“To love the glory of God more than our own glory is also to seek approval from God rather than other people.”
“The power to save lies in the one who is gazed upon, not the one who does the looking.”
“Only if we share Christ's death on earth will we share his life in heaven.”
“We are not under law as a way of salvation but as a guide to conduct. ”
“We are terrified to see what fallible, arrogant humanity can do with the hard steel of the absolute standards of right and wrong.”
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John Robert Walmsley Stott is a British Christian leader and Anglican clergyman who is noted as a leader of the worldwide evangelical movement. He is famous as one of the principal authors of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974.
Stott was ordained in 1945 and went on to become a curate at All Souls Church, Langham Place (1945-1950) then rector (1950-75). This was the church in which he had grown up, and in which he has spent almost all of his life, aside from a few years spent in Cambridge.
Stott played a central role at two landmark events in the history of British evangelicalism. He was chairing the National Assembly of Evangelicals in 1966, a convention organised by the Evangelical Alliance, when Martyn Lloyd-Jones made an unexpected call for evangelicals to unite together as evangelicals and no longer within their 'mixed' denominations.