R. C. Sproul Quotations | Page 2

He is intangible and invisible. But His work is more powerful than the most ferocious wind. The Spirit brings order out of chaos and beauty out of ugliness. He can transform a sin-blistered man into a paragon of virtue. The Spirit changes people. The Author of life is also the Transformer of life.

The sweetest fragrance, the most beautiful aroma that God has ever detected emanating from this planet, was the aroma of the perfect sacrifice of Jesus that was offered once and for all on the cross.

It's not the wickedness of the pagan that breaks my heart. It's the compromise of the Christian that grieves my soul.

Anyone who takes his faith seriously and speaks in behalf of Christ and His kingdom will be accused of fanaticism at some point.

Grace, by definition, is something that God is not required to grant. He owes a fallen world no mercy.

Perhaps the most difficult task for us to perform is to rely on God’s grace and God’s grace alone for our celebration. It is difficult for our pride to rest on grace. Grace is for other people—for beggars. We don’t want to live by a heavenly welfare system. We want to earn our own way and atone for our own sins. We like to think that we will go to heaven because we deserve to be there.

I'm afraid that in the United States of America today the prevailing doctrine of justification is not justification by faith alone. It is not even justification by good works or by a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in our culture today is justification by death. All one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die.

Hope is called the anchor of the soul because it gives stability to the Christian life. But hope is not simply a 'wish' I wish that such-and-such would take place rather, it is that which latches on to the certainty of the promises of the future that God has made.

What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist’s subject be religious to be Christian? I don’t think so. There is a certain sense in which art is its own justification. If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful

One might pray and not be a Christian, but one cannot be a Christian and not pray.

It is by virtue of the atonement that God can maintain His justice and yet demonstrate His mercy...

Regeneration is a work of the omnipotent power of God, power that nothing can overcome or resist.

The world is filled with God's glory. You can't turn without bumping into it.

The only freedom that man ever has is when he becomes a slave to Jesus Christ.

When the gospel is at stake, everything is at stake.

Most Christians salute the sovereignty of God but believe in the sovereignty of man.

In Reformed theology, if God is not sovereign over the entire created order, then he is not sovereign at all. The term sovereignty too easily becomes a chimera. If God is not sovereign, then he is not God.

To honor God as God, we must worship Him as He and He alone decrees.

The complaint that church is boring is never made by people in awe.

Mindless Christianity is no Christianity at all. You can't love what you don't know.

Give me the biblical Christ or give me nothing.

Sin can bring pleasure, but never happiness.

Without God man has no reference point to define himself.

As the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, so the denial of God is the height of foolishness.

Genuine love for Jesus manifests itself in obedience to His commandments.

Touching His human nature, Jesus is no longer present with us. Touching his Divine nature, He is never absent from us.

Prayer does change things, all kinds of things. But the most important thing it changes is us.

Not until we take God seriously will we ever take sin seriously.

Satan can do only what the sovereign God allows him to do.

God is the foundation of all authority, He exercises that foundation because He is the author and the owner of His creation. He is the foundation upon which all other authority stands or falls.

The Bible never tells us to take a blind leap of faith into the darkness and hope that there's somebody out there. The Bible calls us to jump out of the darkness and into the light. That is not a blind leap. The faith that the New Testament calls us to is a faith rooted and grounded in something that God makes clear is the truth.

It is important that when we are engaged in admonition or exhortation or confrontation with a brother who is overcome in sin, we call attention to the truth in an extraordinarily compassionate and tender and loving spirit.

Without God man has no reference point to define himself. 20th century philosophy manifests the chaos of man seeking to understand himself as a creature with dignity while having no reference point for that dignity.

Heaven is a place where God will personally wipe away our tears.

To say that God's sovereignty is limited by man's freedom is to make man sovereign.

For the soul of a person to be inflamed with passion for the living God, that person's mind must first be informed about the character and will of God. There can be nothing in the heart that is not first in the mind. Though it is possible to have theology on the head without its piercing the soul, it cannot pierce the soul without first being grasped by the mind.

Whenever I read the psalms, I feel like I am eavesdropping on a saint having a personal conversation with God.

The greatest weakness in the church today is that the servants of God keep looking over their shoulder for the approval of men.

Holiness provokes hatred. The greater the holiness, the greater the human hostility toward it. It seems insane. No man was ever more loving than Jesus Christ. Yet even His love made people angry. His love was a perfect love, a transcendent and holy love, but HIs very love brought trauma to people. This kind of love is so majestic we can't stand it.

Unbelievers can tolerate Christ only as long as He is stripped of His real identity.

There is nothing more foreign, more alien, to our nature than holiness.

If you don’t delight in the fact that your Father is holy, holy, holy, then you are spiritually dead. You may be in a church. You may go to a Christian school. But if there is no delight in your soul for the holiness of God, you don’t know God. You don’t love God. You’re out of touch with God. You’re asleep to his character.

The very heart of worship, as the Bible makes clear, is the business of expressing, from the depths of our spirits, the highest possible honor we can offer before God.

Any conception of a god that is less than sovereign is an idol and no god at all.

The Bible's truth does not depend in any way on whether or not a person believes the truth.

If God says, 'I forgive you,' you are forgiven no matter how you feel, and to refuse that forgiveness is an act of arrogance.

The Christian life is to live all of your life in the presence of God.

True faith always produces real conformity to Christ.

No sinner has the right to say with impunity, 'God you owe me grace.' If grace is owed, it is not grace. The very essence of grace is its voluntary character. God reserves to himself the sovereign, absolute right to give grace to some and withhold that grace from others.

Fallen man is free to choose what he desires, but because his desires are only wicked he lacks the moral ability to come to Christ. As long as he remains in the flesh, unregenerate, he will never choose Christ. He cannot choose Christ precisely because he cannot act against his own will. His fall is so great that only the effectual grace of God working in his heart can bring him to faith.

When we behold the face of God, all memories of pain and suffering will vanish. Our souls shall be totally healed.

The grounds of your justification are the perfect works of Jesus Christ. We're saved by works, but they're not our own.

We want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanity’s rebellion from God.

God's graciousness is not totally removed from any individual during this lifetime. In hell, it is.

People need a consistent explanation of the cross of Christ and what it accomplished. Christ's atoning work is the centerpiece of the gospel and the only solution for humanity's estrangement from our Creator.

God’s grace is not infinite. God is infinite, and God is gracious. We experience the grace of an infinite God, but grace is not infinite. God sets limits to His patience and forbearance. He warns us over and over again that someday the ax will fall and His judgment will be poured out.

We've replaced the proclamation of Christ with an easy-listening legalism of do more and try harder.

It is fashionable in some academic circles to exercise scholarly criticism of the Bible. In so doing, scholars place themselves above the Bible and seek to correct it. If indeed the Bible is the Word of God, nothing could be more arrogant. It is God who corrects us; we don’t correct Him. We do not stand over God but under Him.

If you’re not accountable in life that means ultimately that your life doesn’t count.

Seeking God? We have totally revised corporate worship services to be sensitive to "seekers." If worship were to be tailored for seekers, it would be directed exclusively to believers, for no one except believers ever seeks God (Rom. 3:9-12).

The more faithful preachers are to the Word of God in their preaching, the more liable they are to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful people are to the Word of God the higher the message is that they will preach. The higher the message, the further they will be from obeying themselves.

A married person does not live in isolation. He or she has made a promise, a pledge, a vow, to another person. Until that vow is fulfilled and the promise is kept, the individual is in debt to his marriage partner. That is what he owes. 'You owe it to yourself' is not a valid excuse for breaking a marriage vow but a creed of selfishness.

If you don't know you're in a state of grace, then you're vulnerable to the paralysis of the accusations of the enemy.

You are required to believe, to preach, and to teach what the Bible says is true, not what you want the Bible to say is true.

When God writes our names in the 'Lamb's Book of Life' He doesn't do it with an eraser handy. He does it for eternity.

Truth is too important to kill it in the streets for the sake of peace.

What about putting Christ back into Christmas? It is simply not necessary. Christ has never left Christmas.

What we celebrate at Christmas is not so much the birth of a baby, but the incarnation of God Himself

Divorce Myths: 1. When love has gone out of a marriage, it is better to get divorced. 2. It is better for the children for the unhappy couple to divorce than to raise their children in the atmosphere of an unhappy marriage. 3. Divorce is the lesser of two evils. 4. You owe it to yourself. 5. Everyone's entitled to one mistake. 6. God led me to this divorce.

Isn't is amazing that almost everyone has an opinion to offer about the Bible, and yet so few have studied it?

The issue of faith is not so much whether we believe in God, but whether we believe the God we believe in. (p.35)

The wearing of fabric head coverings in worship was universally the practice of Christian women until the twentieth century. What happened? Did we suddenly find some biblical truth to which the saints for thousands of years were blind? Or were our biblical views of women gradually eroded by the modern feminist movement that has infiltrated the Church

Your task, O preacher, is to make sure that you are faithful to the text, that you are faithful to the proclamation of that gospel, that you are faithful to set forth the whole counsel of God, and then step back and let it happen.

The more I learn about God, the more aware I become of what I don’t know about him.

We are able to persevere only because God works within us, within our free wills. And because God is at work in us, we are certain to persevere. The decrees of God concerning election are immutable. They do not change, because He does not change. All whom He justifies He glorifies. None of the elect has ever been lost.

If God did not act first, no one would be saved.

I'll retire when they pry my cold, dead fingers off of my Bible.

The most obscene symbol in human history is the Cross; yet in its ugliness it remains the most eloquent testimony to human dignity.

If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.

There are times when we suffer innocently at other people’s hands. When that occurs, we are victims of injustice. But that injustice happens on a horizontal plane. No one ever suffers injustice on the vertical plane. That is, no one ever suffers unjustly in terms of his or her relationship with God. As long as we bear the guilt of sin, we cannot protest that God is unjust in allowing us to suffer.

Preachers must always fight the temptation to preach anything but Christ and Him crucified.

The fundamental deception of Satan is the lie that obedience can never bring happiness.

To focus our mind on the task at hand-with fierce concentration-m akes for a productive use of time.

Scratching people where they itch and addressing their 'felt needs' is a stratagem of the poor steward of the oracles of God. This was the recipe for success for the false prophets of the Old Testament.

When you enter the voting booth, don't leave your Christianity in the parking lot.

The real crisis of worship today is not that the preaching is paltry or that it's too drafty in church. It is that people have no sense of the presence of God, and if they have no sense of His presence, how can they be moved to express the deepest feelings of their souls to honor, revere, worship, and glorify God?

We do not segment our lives, giving some time to God, some to our business or schooling, while keeping parts to ourselves. The idea is to live all of our lives in the presence of God, under the authority of God, and for the honor and glory of God. That is what the Christian life is all about.

The house that is built upon the sand will crumble at the first sign of a windstorm.

We live in a time of crisis in the secular culture and in the church with regard to the beautiful.

Jesus' life was a storm of controversy. The apostles, like the prophets before them, could hardly go a day without controversy. Paul said that he debated daily in the marketplace. To avoid controversy is to avoid Christ. We can have peace, but it is a servile and carnal peace where truth is slain in the streets.

I think Arminianism is death to Christianity!

The great misconception in our day is this: that God isn´t concerned to protect His own integrity. He´s a kind of wishy-washy deity, who just waves a wand of forgiveness over everybody. No. For God to forgive you is a very costly matter.

It is important for us to make a distinction between the spiritual fruit of joy and the cultural concept of happiness. A Christian can have joy in his heart while there is still spiritual depression in his head. The joy that we have sustains us through these dark nights and is not quenched by spiritual depression. The joy of the Christian is one that survives all downturns in life.

If there is one maverick molecule in all the universe, then God is not sovereign. And if God is not sovereign, He is not God.

The rapture will not be secret but open and manifest. Its purpose will not be to whisk the elect away from the earth for a while until Christ returns for a 'second' Second Coming. The purpose of the rapture is to allow the saints to meet Jesus in the air as He returns and be included in His entourage during His triumphal descent from Heaven. His coming in this manner will be attended by the general resurrection, the final judgment, and the end of the world.

The moment we think we deserve mercy a little alarm bell should go off in our head because we are not talking about mercy anymore but justice.

We have a tendency to think of GOD being glorified only in the manifestation of his mercy----- He is just as glorified by His justice.

The presumptuous sin of Uzzah was that He assumed his hands were less polluted than the dirt.

Christ is still in Christmas, and for one brief season the secular world broadcasts the message of Christ over every radio station and television channel in the land. Never does the church get as much free air time as during the Christmas season.

I’ve often wondered where Jesus would apply His hastily made whip if He were to visit our culture. My guess is that it would not be money-changing tables in the temple that would feel His wrath, but the display racks in Christian bookstores.