R. C. Sproul Quotations

'Economics for Everybody' begins with understanding God's principles for organizing His creation and what that means for us as creatures and stewards.

We live in age of compromise, but if we stand on the bedrock of God’s truth, we will not bend with the winds of relativism and faithlessness.

God just doesn't throw a life preserver to a drowning person. He goes to the bottom of the sea, and pulls a corpse from the bottom of the sea, takes him up on the bank, breathes into him the breath of life and makes him alive.

A god who is all love, all grace, all mercy, no sovereignty, no justice, no holiness, and no wrath is an idol.

We talk about predestination because the Bible talks about predestination. If we desire to build our theology on the Bible, we run head on into this concept. We soon discover that John Calvin did not invent it.

Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once and He volunteered.

The pursuit of God is not a part-time, weekend exercise. If it is, chances are you will experience a part-time, weekend freedom. Abiding requires a kind of staying power. The pursuit is relentless. It hungers and thirsts. It pants as the deer after the mountain brook. It takes the kingdom by storm...The pursuit of God is a pursuit of passion. Indifference will not do. To abide in the Word is to hang on tenaciously. A weak grip will soon slip away. Discipleship requires staying power. We sign up for duration. We do not graduate until heaven.

When there’s something in the Word of God that I don’t like, the problem is not with the Word of God, it’s with me.

The cross was a glorious outworking of the grace of God, by which the Father commissioned the Son to make full satisfaction so that sinners might be saved with no sacrifice of God’s justice.

God is not going to negotiate His holiness... in order to accommodate us.

No Christian can avoid theology. Every Christian is a theologian. Perhaps not a theologian in the technical or professional sense, but a theologian nevertheless. The issue for Christians is not whether we are going to be theologians but whether we are going to be good theologians or bad ones.

God does not rule by the consent of His subjects but by His sovereign authority. His reign extends over me whether I vote for Him or not.

We have to determine our theology from the Word of God, not from what we feel.

It is one thing to believe in God; it is quite another to believe God.

God doesn't need our consent in order to govern us; He made us.

To solve a marriage problem, you have to talk with each other about it, choosing wisely the time and place. But when accusations and lengthy speeches of defense fill the dialogue, the partners are not talking to each other but past each other. Take care to listen more than you speak. If you still can't agree on a solution, consider asking a third party, without a vested interest, to mediate.

Sin is not simply making bad choices or mistakes. Sin is having the desire in our hearts to do the will of the enemy of God.

I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed it—His Word. He alone has the power to change lives for eternity, and that power is focused on the Scriptures.

To know that God knows everything about me and yet loves me is indeed my ultimate consolation.

God not only initiated my salvation, He not only sowed the seed, but He made sure that that seed germinated in my heart by regenerating me by the power of the Holy Ghost.

Right now counts forever.

The Word of God can be in the mind without being in the heart; but it cannot be in the heart without first being in the mind.

Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him... To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls.

God did not die. The God who took on Himself a human nature died in His humanity, but the deity did not perish on the cross.

The sin of fallen man is this: Man seeks the benefits of God while at the same time fleeing from God Himself.

Though sin often brings immediate pleasure, it gives no lasting joy.

Christ exposed Himself not only to the unbridled hostility of angry men, but, more significantly, to the unmitigated wrath of God.

In Christian marriage, love is not an option. It is a duty.

Our prayers cannot force God to do anything, but He uses them as His own instruments to bring about His will.

No unborn baby has ever had the right to choose or deny its own destruction.

Man’s will is free to follow his inclinations, but fallen man’s inclinations are always and invariably away from God.

Disciples of Christ abide in His Word. Those who abide in His Word know the truth and are free.

Repentance is something that is brought about in the human heart by the work of God the Holy Spirit.

When God says something, the argument is over.

We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.

Advice to aspiring ministers: Get in the Word. Stay in the Word. Master the Word. And for heaven's sake, preach the Word!

The irony of New Testament lordship is that only in slavery to Christ can a man discover authentic freedom.

The human dilemma is this: God is Holy and we are not. God is Righteous and we are not.

The gospel is only good news when we understand the bad news.

It is the Holy Spirit who inspired the Bible. It is the Holy Spirit who illumines the Bible.

God is serious about how we worship Him, and we must be serious about it, too.

If God is the Creator of the entire universe, then it must follow that He is the Lord of the whole universe. No part of the world is outside of His lordship. That means that no part of my life must be outside of His lordship.

We may live in a culture that believes everyone will be saved, that we are 'justified by death' and all you need to do to go to heaven is die, but God’s Word certainly doesn’t give us the luxury of believing that.

At the moment I sin, I desire the sin more than I desire to please God.

There are only two ways that God’s justice can be satisfied with respect to your sin. Either you satisfy it or Christ satisfies it. You can satisfy it by being banished from God’s presence forever. Or you can accept the satisfaction that Jesus Christ has made.

To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, to the glory of God.

There are many today who believe that there are people running around this world right now who are performing greater miracles, performing miracles in greater abundance, and actually doing more incredible acts of divine healing than Jesus himself did. I can’t think of any more serious delusion than that...

There is not one piece of cosmic dust that is outside the scope of God's sovereign providence.

The most violent expression of God's wrath and justice is seen in the Cross. If ever a person had room to complain for injustice, it was Jesus. He was the only innocent man ever to be punished by God. If we stagger at the wrath of God, let us stagger at the Cross. Here is where our astonishment should be focused.

Change marriage and you change the world. Convince people that government, not God, lays down the rules for marriage, and they will believe more strongly that they determine right and wrong, that not even the world's rulers are subject to a higher authority.

If you truly have it, you never lose it; and if you lose it, you never truly had it.

Nothing could be more irrational than the idea that something comes from nothing.

We are secure, not because we hold tightly to Jesus, but because He holds tightly to us.

We need the church as urgently as a starving baby needs his mother’s milk.

At its root, this is what faith is. It is not believing in God. It's believing God.

The only works of righteousness that serve to justify a sinner are the works of Christ.

No Christian can avoid theology. Every Christian has a theology. The issue, then, is not, dowe want to have a theology? That's a given. The real issue is, do we have a sound theology.? Do we embrace true or false doctrine?

God's grace is so powerful that it has the capacity to overcome our natural resistance to it.

You have to stop thinking logically to argue that the universe came into being by itself, out of nothing.

If you care about the slaughter of the innocent, then for God's sake, speak up.

Reformed theology so far transcends the mere five points of Calvinism that it is an entire worldview.

To be a Christian is to be a theologian-a student of God and his will. The contemporary disdain for theological content and emphasis on self-image and emotions were not shared by the apostolic church.

The only thing that we have earned at the hands of perfect justice is perfect punishment.

Prayer is to the Christian what breath is to life, yet no duty of the Christian is so neglected.

If you take away the cross as an atoning act, you take away Christianity.

Humanism was not invented by man, but by a snake who suggested that the quest for autonomy might be a good idea.

The principle rule of interpreting Scripture is that Scripture interprets Scripture.

The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God.

Every sin is an act of cosmic treason, a futile attempt to dethrone God in His sovereign authority.

Our natural inclination is to hide ourselves from God.

No one was ever called by God to greater suffering than God's only begotten Son.

The only righteousness that meets the requirements of the Law is the righteousness of Christ.

Christ told his disciples not to be anxious about tomorrow, but he never said not to consider tomorrow. Intelligent problem solving demands careful consideration of the future effects of present solutions.

Why do those who keep insisting Jesus hung out with sinners also keep insisting there's no such thing as sin?

Here, then, is the real problem of our negligence. We fail in our duty to study God's Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are lazy.

God’s sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it.

If it were left to us, we would all fall away from the faith and perish.

If God is not sovereign, God is not God.

The main problem with those who deny the existence of God is not intellectual. It is not because of insufficient information, or that God's manifestation of himself in nature has been obscured. The atheists' problem is not that they cannot know God, rather it is they do not want to know him. Man's problem with the existence of God is not an intellectual problem; it is a moral problem." For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men - Rom. 1:18"

If the final decision for the salvation of fallen sinners were left in the hands of fallen sinners, we would despair all hope that anyone would be saved.

Like Muslims we assume that God will judge us "on balance." If our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds, we will arrive safely in heaven. But, alas, if our evil deeds outweigh our good ones, we will suffer the wrath of God in hell. We may be "marred" by sin but in no wise devastated by it. We still have the ability to balance our sins with our own righteousness. This is the most monstrous lie of all.

The worst sin against stewardship is to waste your life.

Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God

I can’t make the Bible come alive for anyone. The Bible is already alive. It makes me come alive.

I had actually gone to a church-related college, but I went on a football scholarship, not because of any interest in the church.

We break our promises to one another. We break our promises to God. But God never breaks His promises to us.

When God's justice falls, we are offended because we think God owes perpetual mercy. We must not take His grace for granted. We must never lose our capacity to be amazed by grace

It is imperative that the Christian, at the beginning of his pursuit to understand what true worship is, gets it clear that the object of our worship is to be God and God alone.

By His life, death, and resurrection, our Savior has conquered our enemies, and by His Spirit He has granted us to share in the victory.

Burning hearts are not nourished by empty heads

The idea of being the Substitute in offering an atonement to satisfy the demands of God’s law for others was something Christ understood as His mission from the moment He entered this world and took upon Himself a human nature. He came from heaven as the gift of the Father for the express purpose of working out redemption as our Substitute, doing for us what we could not possibly do for ourselves.

One does not structure the church to meet the felt needs and desires of the tares. The purpose of corporate assembly, which has its roots in the Old Testament, is for the people of God to come together corporately to offer their sacrifices of praise and worship to God. So the first rule of worship is that it be designed for believers to worship God in a way that pleases God.

There is nothing in this universe you need more desperately than Christ.

To despise doctrine is to despise the Word of God.

Just as the normative standard for the good and for the true is God, so the ultimate standard of beauty is God.

Grace and mercy are never deserved.

Your personal testimony, however meaningful it is to you, is not the gospel.

But the blessing Christ promised, the blessing of great reward, is a reward of grace. The blessing is promised even though it is not earned. Augustine said it this way: Our rewards in heaven are a result of God's crowning His own gifts.

For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition for membership.

We cannot change God. God is unchangeable. If changes are to be made, they must be made in us.