R. C. Sproul Quotations | Page 3

The glory of the gospel is this: The one from whom we need to be saved is the one who has saved us.

It's dangerous to assume that because a man is drawn to holiness in his study that he is thereby a holy man. I am sure that the reason that I have a deep hunger to learn of the holiness of God is precisely because I am not holy.

What is the difference between the Christian God, and the gods of the other religions?" He simply, yet profoundly answered, "The main difference is this: The God of Christianity exists.

The Bible alone is the only authority that can bind the conscience of a person absolutely because it is the only authority that carries with it the intrinsic authority of God Himself.

The Christian should be able to say with the psalmist, 'Oh, how I love your law.'

The gospel is the proclamation of the person and work of Jesus Christ and how those benefits can be applied to us by faith alone.

Cynicism and skepticism are the crudest form of quasi-intellectualism... Let the cynic become cynical of his cynicism and the skeptic skeptical of his skepticism and join the battle.

Confession should be a daily activity for the Christian, whose entire pilgrimage is characterized by the spirit of repentance.

Before I can call upon Christ as my Savior, I have to understand that I need a savior. I have to understand that I am a sinner. I have to have some understanding of what sin is.I have to understand that God exists. I have to understand that I am estranged from that God, and that I am exposed to that God's judgment. I don't reach out for a savior unless I am first convinced that I need a savior. All of that is pre-evangelism. It is involved in the data or the information that a person has to process with his mind before he can either respond to it in faith or reject it in unbelief.

In the culture of pluralism...the only thing that cannot be tolerated is a claim to exclusivity.

It's a sin to bore people.

The more sanctified a person is the more heavily weighted his prayer time is in adoration.

A holy God is both just and merciful. He is never unjust.

I rest solely in His righteousness and in His atonement because I know there is nothing I can do to make up for my own iniquity.

We have a generation of people who think they can stand before the judgment seat of God despite their sins.

Modern man has lost any sense of God's nearness, but Christianity teaches that God reveals himself through every single thing he has ever brought into being, whether a created object or historical event.

The God of popular religion is not holy.

In the decade of the 1980s, a massive and comprehensive study of religion in American life was undertaken by the Gallup organization. The results of the study were as terrifying as they were revealing. Americans, even evangelical Americans, are woefully ignorant of the content of Scripture and even more ignorant of the history of Christianity and classical Christian theology.

We experience the grace of an infinite God, but grace is not infinite.

When one encounters truth, one encounters the God whose truth it is.

Dr. Boice's commentary series is a treasure for the church and for her pastors. No expository preacher can afford to be without it.

Look to the Bible and not your feelings as the basis of the Christian life.

What better evidence could there be of a man's salvation than that he offers to others the grace he himself has received?

God's grace is not infinite. God is infinite, and God is gracious.

The Advent season is that time when we seek to, in a manner of speaking, mute our memory of what has already happened, that we might brighten our joy that it happened. We leave the already of His advent to taste the bitter of the not yet. We, in short, go back, that we might look forward to His coming.

Only a true faith that applies God’s Word to everything-incl uding economics-will lead to the revival and reformation our culture needs so badly.

Dead men do not cooperate with grace. Unless regeneration takes place first, there is no possibility of faith.

Reformed theology does NOT teach that God brings the ELECT kicking and screaming, against their will, into His kingdom. It teaches that God so-works in the hearts of the Elect as to make them willing and pleased to come to Christ. They come to Christ because they want to. They want to because God has created in their hearts a desire for Christ.

A Christian is not a skeptic. A Christian is a person with a burning heart, a heart set aflame with certainty of the resurrection.

When people ask me to name the Ligonier teaching material they should use to help them grow; I tell them, 'You should start with The Holiness of God.'

The power of the gospel is the word of God . . . nobody needs a gospel if there’s no judgment, or law, if God is not a God of judgment. If there is no such thing as hell, what good is the gospel?

Sin is cosmic treason

The holiness of God is traumatic to unholy people.

We take comfort, however, that mystery is not a synonym for contradiction.

In His tender mercies, God has an incredible capacity to love the unlovely.

A faithful person is revealed by those who hate him or her. Are you hated for your faith or ethics? If nobody hates you, maybe you have not displayed Christ openly enough.

The question is not, "Why is there only one way to God?" but "Why is there even one way?"

We fall privately before we ever fall publicly.

The Spirit always communicates that He's for you when He convicts you of your sin.

The whole concept of providence is that God knows everything about what we do.

Unbelief is judged by Jesus not as an intellectual error but as a hostile act of prejudice against God himself.

The Arminian view makes the final decision of our salvation rest upon a human choice, not upon a divine action.

The one place where the Christian can be naked without fear is in the presence of Christ.

If I know anything about the character of God after fifty years of ministry, I know that God hates abortion.

The more seriously we understand the radical nature of sin, the more it exercises a restraint upon us.

If grace is obligated it is no longer grace. The very essence of grace is that it is undeserved.

By definition, the big difference between mercy and justice is that mercy is never ever obligatory.

I get irritated when I hear preachers say, "Come to Jesus and all your problems will be over." That's just simply a lie.

Faith never requires us to crucify our minds or deny our senses.

Satan could make an "A" in my Systematic Theology course. He knows the information and knows that the information is true.

To call a Christian a theist is roughly equivalent to calling the space shuttle Atlantis a glider.

We live in a culture where the truth claims of Christianity are not only rejected, they are ridiculed.

Even the slightest sin is an act of cosmic treason.

We tend to have mixed feelings about the holy. There is a sense in which we are at the same time attracted to it and repulsed by it. Something draws us toward it, while at the same time we want to run away from it. We can’t seem to decide which way we want it. Part of us yearns for the holy, while part of us despises it. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it.

One can have knowledge without having wisdom, but one cannot have wisdom without having knowledge.

When you feel depressed, it helps to actively change your environment. Go and do something different. Martin Luther conquered his depression by going outside to work in his garden. Surprisingly enough, one of the best ways to handle depression is to go to work immediately on the task you least enjoy. (The chances are your depression is caused by guilt feelings arising out of neglect of those tasks.)

What higher approval could a person enjoy than to know that what he or she has done is pleasing to God?

Without God upholding the universe from moment to moment, nothing could continue to be.

There's probably no concept in theology more repugnant to modern America than the idea of divine wrath.

Why would the disciples invent a God whose holiness was more terrifying than the forces of nature that provoked them to invent a god in the first place?

We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.

We are not doomed to an ultimate conflict with no hope of resolution. The message of the Scripture is one of victory - full, final and ultimate victory. It is not our doom that is certain, but Satan's. His head has been crushed by the heel of Christ, who is the Alpha and Omega.

It’s dangerous to assume that because a person is drawn to holiness in his study that he is thereby a holy man. There is irony here. I am sure that the reason I have a deep hunger to learn of the holiness of God is precisely because I am not holy. I am a profane man—a man who spends more time out of the temple than in it. But I have had just enough of a taste of the majesty of God to want more. I know what it means to be a forgiven man and what it means to be sent on a mission. My soul cries for more. My soul needs more.

For a work to be considered good it must not only conform outwardly to the law of God, but it must be motivated inwardly by a sincere love for God.

The problem in the church today is not the profession of faith, but it's possession.

We prefer the shadows where we feel safe over the light which exposes us and causes us to say 'woe is me!'

If the being of God ceased for one second, the universe would disappear.

We persevere because we are preserved by our High Priest's intercession.

God is not blind; neither is He capricious. For Him there are no accidents. With God there are no cases of chance events.

The atonement is a multifaceted event-Jesus is shown providing surety for our debt to God, mediating the enmity between us and God, and offering Himself as a substitute to suffer God's judgment in our place.

Was Luther crazy? Perhaps. But if he was, our prayer is that God would send to this earth an epidemic of such insanity that we too may taste of the righteousness that is by faith alone.

Scripture does not say that God is 'love, love, love' or that He is 'wrath, wrath, wrath,' but that He is 'holy, holy, holy.'

The gospel of Jesus Christ must be defended in every generation. It is always the center of attack by the forces of evil.

It is one thing to fall victim to the flood or to fall prey to cancer; it is another thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Natural man’s sin is precisely this: He wants the benefits of God without God Himself.

The neutral view of free will is impossible. It involves choice without desire.

Every person needs to feel significant. We want our lives to count. We yearn to believe that in some way we are important and that hunger for significance-a drive as intense as our need for oxygen-doesn't come from pride or ego. It comes from God because he wants each of us to understand how important we are. ... We must seek our roots, our origin, and our destiny so that we can know our present value. ..... ...We can help each other realize that we are persons of significance being made in the image of God.

Without the gospel, a gathering of people, though they claim otherwise, cannot be an authentic church.

The grand difference between a human being and a Supreme being is precisely this: Apart from God I cannot exist; apart from me God does exist. God does not need me in order for Him to be. I do need God in order for me to be. We are dependent. We are fragile. This is how we differ from God.

We have to find in Christ, not a mask that conceals our face, but an entire wardrobe of clothing, which is His righteousness.

A loving God who has no wrath is no God. He is an idol of our own making as much as if we carved Him out of stone.

The truth of Scripture is meant not only to be studied-it’s meant also to be sung.

If Christ could make a complaint, it would be, "My bride never talks to me".

The resurrection was God the Father's way of authenticating all of the truths that were declared by Jesus.

There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

Prayer is not optional for the Christian; it is required.

If there ever was a time when absolutely nothing existed, all there could possibly be now is nothing.

We are all servants. The only question is whom we will serve.

We have no right to come before God at all, apart from the finished work of Christ.

The whole basis for our relationship with God is rooted and grounded in grace, in that which is not earned.

God wants your life. Not one hour a week, not 10% of your income, He wants you.

When God issues a call to us, it is always a holy call. The vocation of dying is a sacred vocation. To understand that is one of the most important lessons a Christian can ever learn. When the summons comes, we can respond in many ways. We can become angry, bitter or terrified. But if we see it as a call from God and not a threat from Satan, we are far more prepared to cope with its difficulties.

I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.

I believe it to be one of the most important discipleship resources we have produced at Ligonier.

This means that if a person fulfills his or her vocation as a steelmaker, attorney, or homemaker coram Deo, then that person is acting every bit as religiously as a soul-winning evangelist who fulfills his vocation. It means that David was as religious when he obeyed God’s call to be a shepherd as he was when he was anointed with the special grace of kingship. It means that Jesus was every bit as religious when He worked in His father’s carpenter shop as He was in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Men and women who refuse to acknowledge God's existence do so, in the final analysis, because it is contrary to their manner of living. They do not want to bow to the moral claims of a holy God on their lives.

For the Arminian, salvation is possible for all but certain for none. In the Calvinist position, salvation is sure for God's elect.

The only way the kingdom of God is going to be manifest in this world before Christ comes is if we manifest it by the way we live as citizens of heaven and subjects of the King.

The modern movement of worship is designed to break down barriers between man and God, to remove the veil, as it were, from the fearsome holiness of God, which might cause us to tremble. It is designed to make us feel comfortable.

Tabletalk Magazine exists to help establish us in the Word to deepen our understanding of God and apply this knowledge to our daily living.