Inspirational Quotes by D.A. Carson

“Wisdom literature clarifies the polarity between holiness and unholiness, between righteousness and unrighteousness. But although it clarifies, it cannot save us. If all we had were wisdom literature, it would tend to puff us up when we are doing well and drive us to despair when we are not.”

“Here we do well to remember the frequently quoted words of E. M. Bounds: “One of the constitutional enforcements of the gospel is prayer. Without prayer, the gospel can neither be preached effectively, promulgated faithfully, experienced in the heart, nor be practiced in the life. And for the very simple reason that by leaving prayer out of the catalogue of religious duties, we leave God out, and His work cannot progress without Him.”3”

“But tragic is the situation when the preacher or teacher is perpetually unaware of the blatant nonsense he utters, and of the consequent damage he inflicts on the church of God. Nor”

“Listen: The God who is there, the God who has named himself supremely in Jesus, gathers and transforms his people. Without this transformation so-called Christianity is no Christianity at all. For this God gathers and transforms his people.”

“Prayer will never descend to the level where it is nothing more than a retreat house in which we find strength for ourselves,”

“It is all too easy to read the traditional interpretations we have received from others into the text of Scripture. Then we may unwittingly transfer the authority of Scripture to our traditional interpretations and invest them with a false, even an idolatrous, degree of certainty. Because”

“Many local Bible teachers and preachers have never been forced to confront alternative interpretations at full strength; and because they would lose a certain psychological security if they permitted their own questions, aroused by their own reading of Scripture, to come into full play, they are unlikely to throw over received traditions. But”

“By his death we have life. By his crucifixion on a pole, we begin eternal life. The new birth is grounded in Jesus’s death. That is what Jesus is saying. You and I receive the benefit of this not by trying harder or by being ultra-religious but by believing in Jesus.”

“Indeed, if we have experienced anything of the Father’s bountiful forgiveness his mercy must become the standard of our own:”

“For all the failures in Abraham’s life and in your life and mine, God provides the sacrificial lamb. The stories and the accounts begin to multiply through the Old Testament pages in anticipation of the time when God would provide a sacrifice that far exceeds the value of some ram caught in a thicket.”

“...God is more interested in our holiness than in our comfort.”

“What gives sin its most horrendous odor, its most heinous aspect, is precisely that it is defiance of the God who made us and who judges us on the last day.”

“Are you out of your skull? Look around! This is Eden; this is paradise! God knows exactly what he is doing. He made everything; he even made me. My husband loves me and I love him—and we are both intoxicated with the joy and holiness of our beloved Maker. My very being resonates with the desire to reflect something of his spectacular glory back to him. How could I possibly question his wisdom and love? He knows, in a way I never can, exactly what is best—and I trust him absolutely. And you want me to doubt him or question the purity of his motives and character? How idiotic is that? Besides, what possible good can come of a creature defying his Creator and Sovereign? Are you out of your skull?”

“Instead of focusing primarily on one short passage or chapter from the Bible, I shall cite a handful of passages at length and offer some brief comments along the way so that you can hear Paul’s argument with slightly different emphases, emphases that insist that the Good News about Christ and his cross, what the Bible calls “the gospel,” calls out people, gathers them together, and transforms them. Any so-called Christianity that does not incorporate this reality into its vision is not worthy of the name it carries.”

“The first doctrine to be denied, according to the Bible, is the doctrine of judgment. In many disputes about God and religion, this pattern often repeats itself, because if you can get rid of that one teaching, then rebellion has no adverse consequences, and so you are free to do anything.”

“If God makes image-bearers and pronounces what is good and what is evil, if he orders the whole system, then to come along at any point and say, “No, I will declare my own good. What you declare to be evil, I will declare to be good. What you say is good, I will declare to be evil”—this is why the tree bearing this fruit is said to be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What is crucial is not the tree but the rebellion. What is so wretchedly tragic is God’s image-bearer standing over against God. This is the de-god-ing of God so that I can be my own god. This, in short, is idolatry.”

“The tragedy of biblical history, especially during the period of the monarchy, is a picture of the people’s failed attempt to learn how to submit to the rule of God. Instead of surrendering their self-creation, self-promotion, and self-salvation to monolatry, Israelite history shows the enslavement of the human heart to idolatry.”

“We should not think that the serpent’s temptation is nothing more than an invitation to break a rule, arbitrary or otherwise. That is what a lot of people think that “sin” is: just breaking a rule. What is at stake here is something deeper, bigger, sadder, uglier, more heinous. It is a revolution. It makes me god and thus de-gods God.”

“When we fulfill our vocation, when love-dispensing families fan out across the globe, we subdue the planet by a kind of husbandry that prospers the world and all it contains. By the far-flung migrations of families reflecting the self-giving image of God, creation erupts in a song of impassioned thanksgiving to its Maker.”

“This is the God who is there, who has named himself and disclosed himself. In his mercy he has come back again and again to save his people, and he keeps promising an even greater deliverance to come. He insists that the reason people do not see this reality is that this side of the fall we human beings suffer from such a deep moral and spiritual corruption that we are blind to the obvious. It is the fool who says in his heart, “There is no God.”