Inspirational Quotes by D.A. Carson

“He used a minimum of words and no inflection whatsoever. It was a policeman's manner of speaking, direct and unadorned.”

“It is painfully easy for us to come to all kinds of critical points in ministry, service, family development, changes in vocation, and, precisely because we have enjoyed spiritual victories in the past, approach these matters with sophisticated criteria but without prayer. We love our independence. As a result we may repeatedly stumble and fall, because although we have exercised all our intellectual ingenuity we have not sought God’s face, we have not begged him for his wisdom.”

“Forbearance and genuine tenderheartedness are much tougher than niceness, and sometimes…tough love is confrontational (p. 54).”

“We need not think that the only sins that will keep us from prayer are large and gross. We so often fall at the subtle points.”

“God answered prayers first by teaching the need to ask, second by using friends as holy messengers.”

“Such dangers aside, you can greatly improve your prayer life if you combine these first two principles: set apart time for praying, and then use practical ways to impede mental drift.”

“Many facets of Christian discipleship, not least prayer, are rather more effectively passed on by modeling than by formal teaching. Good praying is more easily caught than taught. If it is right to say that we should choose models from whom we can learn, then the obverse truth is that we ourselves become responsible to become models for others. So whether you are leading a service or family prayers, whether you are praying in a small-group Bible study or at a convention, work at your public prayers.”

“At the end of the day, prime allegiance must be to God himself, to God alone.”

“He knew how much pride his people took him being forever misunderstood.”

“The New Testament writers, even while writing the texts on love and forbearance that we are trying to understand and obey, condemn false prophets, expel the man who is sleeping with his step-mother, declare that it would be better for Judas Iscariot if he had not been born, assure readers that the evil of Alexander the metal-worker will be required of him, and solemnly warn of eternal judgement to come. Sometimes, of course, churches with right-wing passions use these same texts to bully their members unto unflagging submission to the local dictator. The threat of church discipline can degenerate into a form of manipulation, of spiritual abuse. Where, then, is the line to be drawn? To a postmodern relativist, any form of confessional discipline will seem nothing more than intolerant, manipulative abuse. From a Christian perspective, what lines must be drawn and why? How does Christian love work itself out in such cases? (p. 149).”

“We do not speak for Christ because we do not so love his name that we cannot bear to see him unacknowledged and unadored. If only our eyes were opened to see his glory, and if only we felt wounded by the shame of his public humiliation among men, we should not be able to remain silent. Rather would we echo the apostles’ words [in Acts 4 v 20]: “we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

“God’s valuation of his people is established by his valuation of Christ.”

“In the first place, Paul says, the utter bankruptcy of all the world’s efforts to know God was part of God’s wise design. It was “in the wisdom of God” that “the world through its wisdom did not know him” (1:21). Not only did the wise and the scholars and the philosophers fail to understand, God in his all-wise providence actually worked it out that way. Their failures are thoroughly blameworthy; their ignorance of God and their endless, self-centered preoccupation are culpable. Nevertheless, no evil, certainly not theirs, can escape the bounds of God’s sovereign providence—and it is God himself who ensures that the world in its wisdom does not know him.”

“The gospel of the crucified Messiah must transform not only our beliefs but our behavior.”

“Not a drop of rain can fall outside the orb of Jesus’ sovereignty. All our days—our health, our illnesses, our joys, our victories, our tears, our prayers, and the answers to our prayers—fall within the sweep of the sovereignty of one who wears a human face, a thorn-shadowed face.”

“The heart of our lostness is our profound self-focus. We do not want to know him, if knowing him is on his terms. We are happy to have a god we can more or less manipulate; we do not want a god to whom we admit that we are rebels in heart and mind, that we do not deserve his favor, and that our only hope is in his pardoning and transforming grace.”

“Christians refuse to believe that there are only two options in engaging our culture: either to assimilate or to separate, to capitulate or to evade, to over-contextualize or to under-adapt. Jeremiah 29 encourages God’s people not to accommodate the foreign culture but to move in and get involved in the life of the city economically and culturally. The prophet is asking the people to be spiritually bicultural. They are being called neither to worship”

“It is the truth and power of the gospel that must change people’s lives, not the glamour of our oratory or the emotional power of our stories.”

“For the better we know God, the more we will want all of our existence to revolve around him,”

“At heart, therefore, they really have grasped the message of Christ crucified, even if they have not brought their lives into conformity with this message.”