Inspirational Quotes by Sinclair B. Ferguson

“What is a godly pastor, after all, but one who is like God, with a heart of grace; someone who sees God bringing prodigals home and runs to embrace them, weeps for joy that they have been brought home, and kisses them—asking no questions—no qualifications or conditions required?”

“When the benefits are seen as abstractable from the Benefactor the issue becomes: 1) For the preacher: “How can I offer these benefits?” and 2) For the hearer: “How can I get these benefits into my life?” But when it is seen that Christ and his benefits are inseparable and that the latter are not abstractable commodities, the primary question becomes: 1) For the preacher: “How do I preach Christ himself?” and 2) For the hearer: “How do I get into Christ?”

“Matthew 22:4 (“Everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast”), he addresses the issue of “those to whom the offer is made”: It is not one or two, or some few that are called, not the great only, nor the small only, not the holy only, nor the profane only, but ye are all bidden; the call comes to all and every one of you in particular, poor and rich, high and low, holy and profane. Then Durham continues: We make this offer to all of you, to you who are Atheists, to you that are Graceless, to you that are Ignorant, to you that are Hypocrites, to you that are Lazy and Lukewarm, to the civil and to the profane, we pray, we beseech, we obtest you all to come to the wedding; Call (saith the Lord) the blind, the maimed, the halt, &c and bid them all come, yea, compel them to come in. Grace can do more and greater wonders than to call such; it can not only make the offer of marriage to them, but it can make up the match effectually betwixt Christ and them. We will not, we dare not say, that all of you will get Christ for a Husband; but we do most really offer him to you all, and it shall be your own fault if ye want him and go without him. And therefore, before we proceed any further, we do solemnly protest, and before God and his Son Jesus Christ, take instruments this day, that this offer is made to you and that it is told to you in his name, that the Lord Jesus is willing to match with you, even the profanest and most graceless of you, if ye be willing to match with him, and he earnestly invites you to come to the wedding.28”

“This is thought to be Jesus’s best-loved parable, usually because our eyes are on the prodigal and his father. But as with jokes, so with parables: there is a principle in both of “end stress.” The “punch line” comes at the end. That being the case the alarming message here is that the spirit of the elder brother, the legalist, is more likely to be found near the father’s house than in the pig farm—or in concrete terms, in the congregation and among the faithful. And sometimes (only sometimes?), it appears in the pulpit and in the heart of the pastor.”

“This might be illustrated by the way in which, for example, John Owen’s work Of the Mortification of Sin has undoubtedly been read by many more younger ministers than either his Glory of Christ or Communion with God. That may be understandable because of the deep pastoral insight in Owen’s short work; but it may also put the practical cart before the theological horse. Owen himself would not have been satisfied with hearers who learned mortification without learning Christ. A larger paradigmatic shift needs to take place than only exchanging a superficial subjectivism for Owen’s rigorous subjectivism. What is required is a radical recentering in a richer and deeper knowledge of Christ, understood in terms of his person and work. There can be little doubt that Owen himself viewed things this way.”

“In Christ we are no longer dominated by the flesh, but by the Spirit; but we are not yet delivered from the flesh. So long as this eschatological tension exists for the believer, so long will there be—in Calvin’s view—a gap between the definition of faith and the actual experience of the believer:”

“There is a kind of orthodoxy in which the several loci of systematic theology, or stages of redemptive history, are all in place, but that lacks the life of the whole, just as arms, legs, torso, head, feet, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth may all be present—while the body as a whole lacks energy and perhaps life itself. The form of godliness is not the same as its power.”

“The offer of the gospel is to be made not to the righteous or even the repentant, but to all. There are no conditions that need to be met in order for the gospel offer to be made.”

“The Marrow Controversy raised a major question about how the gospel is to be preached. But the answer to that question depends on our answer to a more fundamental one: What is the gospel? Contemporary discussion simply underlines how central this question is and the extent to which the answer we give determines how we preach and communicate the gospel.”

“But, as Paul is at pains to stress, the law is good, and just, and holy.50 And we need to understand, sense, feel, and then delight in the grace of law.51 For unless we are persuaded that God has shown his grace in his law as well as in his Son, all we will hear and see at Sinai is thunder and lightning.”

“Repentance then is not the punctiliar decision of a moment but a radical heart transformation that reverses the whole direction of life.”

“Thus it is understanding God’s grace—that is to say, understanding God himself 178—that demolishes legalism. Grace highlights legalism’s bankruptcy and shows that it is not only useless; it is pointless; its life breath is smothered out of it.”

“Repentance unto life is an evangelical grace. . . . By it a sinner, out of the sight and sense of the odiousness of sin, not only of its danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness of his sins, as contrary to the holy nature and righteous law of God, and upon the apprehension of his mercy in Christ to such as are penitent, so grieves for and hates his sins as to turn from them all unto God, purposing and endeavoring to walk with him in all the ways of his commandments.10”

“There are places in our quest for understanding where we reach the limits of the human mind. The finite does not have the capacity fully to grasp and understand the infinite. But it is how we respond just at this point that is significant. Do we say with Nietzsche, “But to reveal my entire heart to you, my friends, if there were gods, how could I stand not to be a god! Therefore, there are no gods.”15 Or do we bow down, “lost in wonder, love, and praise,”16 because we recognize we have come to the horizon of human understanding and can only gaze in awe at the God who is so infinitely great and glorious—and who loves and cares for us?”

“And, with a disregard for other things, he cherished and experienced That blessed communion with God about which he wrote.”

“To become a Christian believer is to be brought into a reality far grander than anything we could ever have imagined. It means communion with the triune God.”

“Repentance is suffused with faith; otherwise it is legal. But then without repentance, faith would be no more than imagination.”

“At the end of the day we cannot divide faith and repentance chronologically. The true Christian believes penitently, and he repents believingly.”

“To run, to work, the law commands, The gospel gives me feet and hands. The one requires that I obey, The other does the power convey.”

“Antinomianism may be couched in doctrinal and theological terms, but it both betrays and masks the heart’s distaste for absolute divine obligation, or duty. That”