Inspirational Quotes by John Stott
“There is much shallowness and levity among us. Prophets and psalmists would probably say of us that ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes’. In public worship our habit is to slouch or squat; we do not kneel nowadays, let alone prostrate ourselves in humility before God. It is more characteristic of us to clap our hands with joy than to blush with shame or tears. We saunter up to God to claim his patronage and friendship; it does not occur to us that he might send us away. We need to hear again the apostle Peter’s sobering words: ‘Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives...in reverent fear.’39 In other words, if we dare to call our Judge our Father, we must beware of presuming on him. It must even be said that our evangelical emphasis on the atonement is dangerous if we come to it too quickly. We learn to appreciate the access to God which Christ has won for us only after we have first seen God’s inaccessibility to sinners. We can cry ‘Hallelujah’ with authenticity only after we have first cried ‘Woe is me, for I am lost’. In Dale’s words, ‘it is partly because sin does not provoke our own wrath, that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God’.40”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“On the contrary, Scripture invariably treats us as morally responsible agents. It lays upon us the necessity of choice between ‘life and good, death and evil’, between the living God and idols.11”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened and some of our vast ignorances diminished.”
“The radical biblical perspective is to see death not as the termination of life but as the gateway to life.”
“Our responsibility before God is an inalienable aspect of our human dignity. Its final expression will be on the day of judgment. Nobody will be sentenced without trial.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“And the Holy Spirit came to ‘convict the world of guilt’, but only in order that he might more effectively bear witness to Christ as the Saviour”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“We are to be like Christ in his incarnation.”
“The faithful preaching of the gospel is the God-appointed means by which the prince of darkness is overthrown and God shines his light into human hearts.”
“In God’s providence we have four gospels! For Jesus Christ is too great and glorious a person to be captured by one author or one perspective.”
― John Stott ,
“The first thing that has to be said about the biblical gospel of reconciliation, however, is that it begins with reconciliation to God, and continues with a reconciled community in Christ. Reconciliation is not a term the Bible uses to describe ‘coming to terms with oneself’, although it does insist that it is only through losing ourselves in love for God and neighbour that we truly find ourselves.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“The essence of discipleship is union with Christ, which means identification with him in both his sufferings and his glory.”
“Indeed, an honest and humble acknowledgment of the evil in our flesh, even after the new birth, is the first step to holiness. To speak quite plainly, some of us are not leading holy lives for the simple reason that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. No man ever cries aloud for deliverance who has not seen his own wretchedness. In other words, the only way to arrive at faith in the power of the Holy Spirit is along the road of self-despair.”
“Nowadays the really great mind is thought to be both broad and open – broad enough to absorb every fresh idea which is presented to it, and open enough to go on doing so for ever.”
“we are to ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’. For what is the use of confessing and lamenting our sin, of acknowledging the truth about ourselves to both God and men, if we leave it there? Confession of sin must lead to hunger for righteousness.”
“Souls are won for Christ by tears and sweat and pain, especially in prayer and in sacrificial personal friendship.”
“The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.”
“Every time we linger in bad company whose insidious influence we know we cannot resist, every time we lie in bed when we ought to be up and praying, every time we read pornographic literature, every time we take a risk which strains our self-control, we are sowing, sowing, sowing to the flesh.”
― John Stott ,
“God's people are his plan to respond to the needs of the oppressed in our world.”
“the law says ‘Do this’; the gospel says ‘Christ has done it all’. The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ’s achievement.”
― John Stott ,
Group of Brands
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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.