Best 115 quotes of D. A. Carson on MyQuotes

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

Sex is about timing. The world says: any time, any place. God says: my time, my place.

Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back.

Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death.

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher's sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity.

Some forms of absolutism are not bad; they may even be heroic.

Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It's not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture.

Some people say What's the use of the term if it has to be so fully documented and constrained and footnoted and all the rest. My response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc. Any term can be distorted or domesticated or fly off the handle because of another alien philosophical structure that's imposed on the text and so on. Inerrancy is no different from what we find in every other theologically loaded word.

...sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances, rather than change our circumstances.

So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things.

"Study Bible" is the expression used for Bibles that include significant explanatory notes, usually at the bottom of the page, sometimes in the margins. Often a Study Bible will also include some brief articles, photographs of geographical and archaeological sites, fairly extensive maps, and charts that summarize a lot of information.

Study Bibles tend to circulate widely, so they play a disproportionate role in helping Christians and others understand holy Scripture. Further, many of our members have long used one or two other Study Bibles, and it is important that Christians not be tied too tightly to only one option, however good it may be.

Systematic theology will ask questions like "What are the attributes of God? What is sin? What does the cross achieve?" Biblical theology tends to ask questions such as "What is the theology of the prophecy of Isaiah? What do we learn from John's Gospel? How does the theme of the temple work itself out across the entire Bible?" Both approaches are legitimate; both are important. They are mutually complementary.

That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble.

The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.

The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God's story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible.

The Bible is not interested in precisionism unless the context indicates that precision is particularly important.

The broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity.

The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him.

The cliché, God hates the sin but love the sinner, is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and on the sinner (John 3:36).

The heart of all idolatry in the Bible is the de-godding of God.

The important thing, Jesus is saying (in Matthew 5:33-37), is to tell the truth and keep one's pledges without insisting that a certain form of words must be used if it is to be binding. No oath is necessary for the truthful person... Their word is so reliable that nothing more than a statement is needed from them.

The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.

The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross.

The New Testament writers did not invent a doctrine of Scripture they inherited it.

The New Testament writers I think conceive of their inspired Scripture writings as flushing out, bringing to articulation, expounding and so on the climactic revelation in the son, but this in self-conscious fulfillment of the promises and covenants that were already made to God's chosen people in Old Testament times.

The notion of the enduring authority focuses on the fact that some people think that notions like authority of Scripture's is passé, while others say that the present configuration of the doctrine of inerrancy is a late addition. And to both we want to say, No we're talking about the enduring authority of Scripture, grounded first and foremost in its relevatory status, something given by God and utterly reliable.

The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin

The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

There is no long-range effective teaching of the Bible that is not accompanied by long hours of ongoing study of the Bible.

The truth of the matter is that inerrancy is simply a way of saying that there are no errors that call into question the truthfulness of Scripture wherever Scripture is making truth claims.

The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.

... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.

To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.

To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.

To worship God 'in spirit and in truth' is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows are being swept away (Hebrews 8:13). Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship.

True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us

Unchecked, the new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains.

We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.

We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray.

We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb.

We treat the Bible, not as if it's a magic book that has to be handled like a piece of abracadabra, make sure it's dusted, never put it on the floor, and things like that.

We want to fan the flames of Christians for whom inerrancy and the authority of Scripture are not mere shibboleths, but part of her life beat, part of the beating heart of what makes them tick. They revere Scripture, not because Scripture becomes an idol, but because it discloses God who is especially come after us in salvation and redemption through the person of his son, his cross, his resurrection, the full sweep of the gospel.

What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus' sake.

What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence.

When Christians speak of the authority of Scripture, because Christians believe that this word, even though it's mediated through many different human authors, nevertheless is God breathed and is revealed by God and is utterly reliable and all that it says, with all of its different literary genres, it's trustworthy and without mistake or distortion. It is trustworthy and therefore, because it is from God it has God's authority.

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery... Will there also be faith?

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery. Will there also be faith? Yes, if our attention is focused more on the cross, and on the God of the cross, than on the suffering itself.