Best 79 quotes of Sinclair B. Ferguson on MyQuotes

Anyone who comes to grips with the issues raised in The Marrow of Modern Divinity will almost certainly grow by leaps and bounds in understanding three things: the grace of God, the Christian life, and the very nature of the gospel itself.

Appearances can be deceptive. The fact that we cannot see what God is doing does not mean that He is doing nothing. The Lord has His own timetable. It is we who must learn to adjust to it, not vice versa. When God's time comes nothing will stand in His way. We can therefore wait for Him with this happy confidence: "As for God, His way is perfect" (2 Samuel 22:31).

Be obedient even when you do not know where obedience may lead you

Christian contentment, therefore, is the direct fruit of having no higher ambition than to belong to the Lord and to be totally at His disposal in the place He appoints, at the time He chooses, with the provision He is pleased to make.

Christianity is Christ because there isn't anything else. There is no atonement that somehow can be detached from who the Lord Jesus is. There is no grace that can be attached to you transferred from Him. All there is, is Christ and your soul.

Christians have a new identity. We are no longer 'in Adam' but 'in Christ'; no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit.

Contentment is an undervalued grace.

Do I learn through dark providences, or simply seem relieved when they are over?

Don't tell me that you have a Reformed Church in the tradition of Calvin until you have the preaching of the Word every day of the week, devote Wednesday's to prayer and have the church gather together for prayer.

Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!

Evil deeds are the fruit of an evil heart. They are not an aberration from our true self but a revelation of it.

For worship is, essentially, the reverse of sin. Sin began (and begins) when we succumb to the temptation, "You shall be as gods." We make ourselves the center of the universe and dethrone God. By contrast, worship is giving God his true worth; it is acknowledging Him to be the Lord of all things, and the Lord of everything in our lives. He is, indeed, the Most High God!

God has chosen us. Our status is not a matter of our worthiness, but of His love.

God is God; you are but one of His creatures. Your only joy is to be found in obeying Him, your true fulfillment is to be found in worshiping Him, your only wisdom is to be found in trusting and knowing Him.

God made everything else but man "after its kind"' - that is, according to the purpose and destiny he envisaged for it. But he made man in His own image. Man is patterned on God! He was made to represent God - in created, human form.

God's guidance will require patience on our part. His leading is not usually a direct assurance, a revelation, but His sovereign controlling of the circumstances of our lives, with the Word of God as our rule. It is therefore, inevitable that the unfolding of His purposes will take time - sometimes a very long time.

God's promises are not fortune cookies. We do not use them in order to get a spiritual "fix" for the day.

How do we bring glory to God? The Bible’s short answer is: by growing more and more like Jesus Christ.

Humility is not simply feeling small and useless - like an inferiority complex. It is sensing how great and glorious God is, and seeing myself in that light.

I began to read for myself and realised that here was somebody who could teach me profound biblical theology, get inside my heart with his spiritual analysis, and help me to become a minister of the gospel, which is what I wanted to be.

If you are justified, you can no more be unjustified than Christ can be pulled down from heaven.

If you desire anything less for yourself than absolute obedience to God, a life of total devotion to the Lord, a life of absolute sin-less-ness - if you desire anything less, you are fighting against God's desire for you.

It is God who gives us the spirit of worship (Psalm 133:3), and it is what we know of God that produces this spirit of worship. We might say that worship is simply theology, doctrine, what we think about God, going into top gear! Instead of merely thinking about Him, we tell Him, in prayer and praise and song, how great and glorious we believe Him to be!

It is only when we want to take our lives out of the Father’s hands and have them under our own control that we find ourselves gripped with anxiety. The secret of freedom from anxiety is freedom from ourselves and abandonment of our own plans. But that spirit emerges in our lives only when our minds are filled with the knowledge that our Father can be trusted implicitly to supply everything we need.

I've often reflected on the rather obvious thought that when his disciples were about to have the world collapse in on them, our Lord spent so much time in the Upper Room speaking to them about the mystery of the Trinity. If anything could underline the necessity of Trinitarianism for practical Christianity, that must surely be it!

Jesus has a special, compassionate concern for those who are broken and needy.

Knowing God is your single greatest privilege as a Christian

Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.

Marriage, and the process of coming to it, is not heaven! It is the bonding together of two needy sinners in order to make a partnership which is substantially greater than either of them alone.

My security as a Christian does not reside in the strength of my faith but in the indestructibili ty of my Savior.

Our first priority in ministry must be love. Love for His Word, love for His people, and love for His appearing.

Our thinking about who we are as Christians should not begin with what we can discover about ourselves by self-analysis. Rather, it begins with what God says about those who trust in Christ.

Probably no theologian in English language has ever rivaled Owen stressing the absolute centrality of Christ's penal substitution and therefore his as Priest. . . . For that reason alone The Priesthood of Christ is worth all the time it takes to read it with humility, care, and reflection.

Remember that you are not saved by increased levels of holiness, however desirable it is that you should reach them. ...It is Christ who saves us-through faith. Your faith is a poor and crumbling thing, as is your spiritual service. Jesus Christ alone is qualified and able to save you because of what He has done.

Repentance is a characteristic of the whole life, not the action of a single moment.

Secular humanism debases the human.

Spiritual growth depends on two things: first a willingness to live according to the Word of God; second, a willingness to take whatever consequences emerge as a result.

Thankfulness grows best in the seed-bed of conviction, just as some plants must be placed in the soil in the winter if they are to flower in the summer.

The conviction that Christian doctrine matters for Christian living is one of the most important growth points of the Christian life.

The determining factor of my existence is no longer my past.

The fear of the Lord tends to take away all other fears... This is the secret of Christian courage and boldness.

The foundation of our love for the Lord lies in the recognition of His holiness, our sinfulness, and His grace.

The foundation of worship in the heart is not emotional ("I feel full of worship" or "The atmosphere is so worshipful"). Actually, it is theological. Worship is not something we "work up," it is something that "comes down" to us, from the character of God.

The foundation of worship in the heart is not emotional...it is theological.

The goal of theology is the worship of God. The posture of theology is on one's knees. The mode of theology is repentance.

The jewels of spiritual service are always quarried in the depths of spiritual experience. Never is this more true than in revival. Bend the church and save the people.

The notion that we are children of God, his own sons and daughters, lies at the heart of all Christian theology, and is the mainspring of all Christian living.

The only thing of my very own which I contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.

The problem is not in the clarity of the revelation. The problem is in the darkness of the human mind.

The real test that I believe that God is love is that tragedies don't separate me from the conviction that God is love.