Inspirational Quotes by D.A. Carson

“You can explain away the feeling of guilt as social conditioning. You can try to erase it. You can find people who’ll tell you that you don’t need to feel it. But guilt is real. And feeling it is part of being a responsible human being. This is what the author Kingsley Amis said in an interview a few years ago, shortly before he died: [To know] you can be forgiven your sins … must be a wonderful thing. I carry my sins around with me. There’s nobody there to forgive them.”

“Let’s be clear: to say there is no hell or to live as if there is no hell is to call Jesus a liar.”

“There will be hunger as well as hostility. Jesus Christ is glorious; the new creation is wonderful; death and hell are real. God is sovereign; he is gracious; and he is powerful. Let’s pray. And then let’s go. Seeing people come to Christ is such an indescribable joy. Are you available?”

“someone who isn’t a Christian, but who gets the point. He’s Penn Jilette, (of Penn and Teller, the magician double-act). Here’s what he said about evangelism, or proselytism: I’ve always said that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytise. I don’t respect that at all. If you believe that there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life, and you think that it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward … how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytise? … I mean, if I believed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you, and you didn’t believe that truck was bearing down on you, there is a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that.”

“Everything teaches, whether you intend it to or not. The songs teach people doctrine and proper affections for God. Your prayers (or lack of them) teach people how to pray themselves. The kinds of prayers you pray (or don’t pray) teach people about the important differences between prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. The way you administer the ordinances teaches people about their meaning, and even the very meaning of the Gospel. Your preaching teaches people how to study and use the Bible appropriately. Everything from the call to worship to the benediction counts as teaching. Teaching is everything.”

“The English word gospel comes from the Anglo-Saxon word God-spell—literally, “God’s story.”

“It includes any form of communicating the gospel, and there are several New Testament verbs that convey this idea, such as martureo (“to testify” or “bear witness”), kerusso (“to herald”), parakaleo (“to exhort”), katangelo (“to proclaim”), or propheteuo (“to prophesy”), and didasko (“to teach”).”

“In Romans 1:1, the apostle Paul tells us that the gospel is “the gospel of God”; it is God’s gospel.* This means the story belongs to God; it is not our story to invent, modify, or embellish. We should also trust in its power. We do not need to add anything to it to make it more powerful.”

“Right now, the Christian faith is exploding in majority world places such as South America, China, and Africa. People are converting because they’ve discovered the freedom, rights, and love that come from knowing and following Jesus. They are not finding Christianity to be a tool of oppression and hate. The opposite is true. They experience it as a tool of liberation, justice, and love. The point is that if we’re thinking that Christianity is a tool of oppression, then maybe we’ve been reading the Bible with a specific lens, a postmodern Western lens, for too long. Or maybe we’ve been hanging around the wrong Christians.”

“But the biblical understanding of metanoia is far more positive. Instead of merely looking inward and regretting the past, it is looking outward and forward. When Jesus says, “Repent [metanoieo], for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 4:17), he is saying, “You must change your hearts—for the kingdom of Heaven has arrived” (Phillips). He is calling us to look ahead to the arrival of the kingdom.”

“The Greek term epistrophe is the second aspect of biblical repentance. It describes a complete turnaround and has both negative and positive aspects: we turn away from something negative and toward something positive.”

“We must also exercise trust (fiducia), making our lives consistent with the truth claims we agree with.”

“Or as the Reformers said, we are saved by faith alone, but that faith is never alone.”

“Dr. Graham Cole has suggested that the New Testament illustrates for us at least three models of conversion: the story of the prodigal son, the conversion of Saul, and the conversion of Timothy.”

“There is always this tension to the act of evangelism. We have a timeless story from God, which is true for all peoples of all cultures and in all places. But at the same time, it has to be told by a person who is in a time, culture, and place.”

“What are plausibility structures? They are accepted beliefs, convictions, and understandings that either green-light truth claims as plausible or red-light them as implausible.”

“So where do we get these plausibility structures? They come from three main sources: (1) community, (2) experience, and (3) facts, evidence, and data.”

“Proverbs 27:19 19As in water face reflects face, So a man’s heart reveals the man.”

“4God is wise in heart and mighty in strength. Who has hardened himself against Him and prospered?”

“If our identity is riding on our differences with other believers, we will tend to major in the study of differences. We may even find ourselves looking for faults in others in order to define ourselves.”