Inspirational Quotes by D.A. Carson

“Once again it is clear Paul does not expect that the answer to our prayers will most likely take us out of the problems, but that our hearts and minds will be garrisoned by the peace of God.”

“Given different sets of circumstances, genuine faith may be tied to an almost desperate trust and anguished petition, to quiet confidence and steadfastness, to praise that bursts the borders of exuberance into spectacular spontaneity.”

“Into some such a situation as this, Jesus defends himself by saying, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working” (5:17). This utterance establishes at least three things. First, by referring to God as “my Father,” Jesus is implicitly saying that he himself is God’s Son. Second, because in the context Jesus is arguing that he has the right to do things on the Sabbath that other human beings do not have the right to do, he is declaring his sonship to be unique. Third, because the warrant for Jesus’s work on the Sabbath is grounded in the fact that God, his Father, works on the Sabbath, Jesus is implicitly claiming he has the prerogatives of God.”

“Clearly the Corinthians adopted their own form of this over-realized eschatology. It was tied to their pride, their endless one-upmanship.”

“What ought to make worship delightful to us is not, in the first instance, its novelty or its aesthetic beauty, but its object: God himself is delightfully wonderful, and we learn to delight in him.”

“The book of Revelation fans the flames of courage and faithfulness in this life, even in the teeth of the most virulent opposition, by holding out the most glorious prospects for the life to come.”

“Their conduct is “loathsome” (6:15) because the people are being neither warned nor reformed, but the preachers, far from being ashamed, “do not even know how to blush” (6:15). Of course not: they are deluded into thinking they are doing the right thing. But the prophet of God is to “ask for the ancient paths” and “ask where the good way is, and walk in it” (6:16). This is not an appeal to boundless traditionalism, but to the inherited revelation of the covenant, of the Word of God, that is being jettisoned in favor of comforting illusion: the people said, “We will not listen” (6:17) and, God says, they “rejected my law” (6:19).”

“We must frankly recognize that this stance is alien to much of our experience in the Western world. Until fairly recently, even the unconverted in the West largely adhered to Judeo-Christian values. However, that consensus is eroding rapidly, and as it does there will be more and more overt opposition to any form of Christianity that tries to maintain allegiance to the Bible.”

“in Hebrews 1:5, Jesus is superior to the angels not only because Old Testament texts and their trajectories point to him as the long-promised Davidic king whose rule extends to the whole world and brings in the consummation, but also because he is not just David’s heir and thus the Son of God by virtue of being the Davidic king, but he is also the Son of God by virtue of his preexistence and unqualified divine status. No angel can match him on either score.”

“By the time of the Mosaic covenant, the peace offering (Lev 17:11ff.) was the divinely prescribed means of maintaining a harmonious relationship between God and his covenant people. The sin offering (Lev 4) dealt with sin as a barrier between the worshipers and God. This sin offering was a slaughtered bull, lamb, or goat with which the worshiper had identified himself by laying his hands on its head. When the blood of the victim, signifying its life (Lev 17:11), was daubed on the horns of the altar, symbolizing the presence of God, God and the worshipers were united in a renewed relationship.”

“genuinely righteous people invariably become more aware of their personal guilt and need for forgiveness than those who have become so foul and hard they cannot detect their own shame.”

“Almost in reaction against such globalization, many people are responding with increasing nationalism, sometimes with almost frightening ethnocentrism. Christians are not immune to these sweeping currents of thought. They, too, can be caught up in flag-waving nationalism that puts the interests of my nation or my class or my race or my tribe or my heritage above the demands of the kingdom of God.”

“Part of our problem is that we have been influenced by a certain strand of contemporary scholarship that envisages christological themes in atomistic ways. Over here is a Son of Man christology; over there is a Son of God christology dependent on Davidic monarchy; yet again, in another place, there is a high priestly christology; and so forth.”

“Thus just as “Jerusalem” sometimes refers to the ancient city by that name, and sometimes, as we have seen, anticipates the new, eschatological Jerusalem, so also “Babylon” not only may refer to the ancient city that reached the pinnacle of its splendor about the sixth century B.C., but becomes a symbol—a symbol that anticipates every proud city or culture that imagines it will live forever and arrogantly measures all things by the standards of its own sins and presuppositions.”

“Not long ago, after I had spoken on the subject of biblical worship at a large metropolitan church, one of the elders wrote to me to ask how I would try to get across my main points to children (fourth to sixth graders, approximately ages ten to twelve). He was referring in particular to things I had said about Romans 12:1–2. I responded by saying that kids of that age do not absorb abstract ideas very easily unless they are lived out and identified. The Christian home, or the Christian parent who obviously delights in corporate worship, in thoughtful evangelism, in self-effacing and self-sacrificing decisions within the home, in sacrificial giving for the poor and the needy and the lost—and who then explains to the child that these decisions and actions are part of gratitude and worship to the sovereign God who has loved us so much that he gave his own Son to pay the price of our sin—will have far more impact on the child’s notion of genuine worship than all the lecturing and classroom instruction in the world. Somewhere along the line it is important not only to explain that genuine worship is nothing more than loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves, but also to show what a statement like that means in the concrete decisions of life. How utterly different will that child’s thinking be than that of the child who is reared in a home where secularism rules all week but where people go to church on Sunday to “worship” for half an hour before the sermon. “Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Ps 95:6–8).”

“It is said that baby busters do not want to be lectured; they expect to be entertained. They prefer videos to books; many of them have not learned to think in a linear fashion; they put more store than they recognize in mere impressions. As a result, they can live with all sorts of logical inconsistencies and be totally unaware of them. (How many times have I tried to explain to a university-age young person who has made some profession of faith that it is fundamentally inconsistent to claim to know and love the God of the Bible, while cohabiting with someone? They can see they are doing what the Bible forbids, but when you press them to articulate the contradiction they scuttle into inconsistency without embarrassment.) They are cynical, not idealistic. They vehemently deny the existence of absolutes: that is their one absolute. Many have never experienced principled morality in the home. They have been brought up without a coherent vision or value system, and they have embraced pragmatism with a vengeance.”

“Moreover, although the people are guilty, Peter understands that it was precisely through the evil execution of Jesus that "God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer" (3:18). That is the supreme irony of all history.”

“Still, whatever he means by saying he is not free from God’s law, there is something intuitively obvious about it. We can easily hear Paul saying, “To the Jew I became a Jew,” and “To the Gentile I became a Gentile”; we cannot imagine him saying, “To the gossip I became a gossip,” and “To the adulterer I became an adulterer.” In other words, while saying he is not under the law as other Jews were, he certainly does not mean to suggest he is an utter antinomian (someone who feels completely free from all of God’s demands and commands).”

“When Hebrews 1:5 quotes Psalm 2:7 with reference to Jesus, it is the Davidic typology that warrants it; that is, the writer to the Hebrews is reading Psalm 2:7 not as an individual prooftext but as one passage within the matrix of the Davidic typology it helps to establish.”

“. That danger is no less treacherous today than in Ezekiel’s time. Somehow we manage to adhere to our creedal profession, but if anything goes wrong our undisciplined rage shows that we maintain little real trust in the living God: our secret idol is comfort and physical well-being. We attend church, but rarely do we pray in private or thoughtfully read the Word of God. We sing lustily at missionary conventions, but have not shared the Gospel with anyone for years. And deep down we are more interested in our reputation, or in sex, or in holidays, than we are in basking in the awesome radiance and majesty of God. Meditate on 14:8, and ask for forgiveness and grace to become more consistent.”