Inspirational Quotes by John Stott
“John is telling us nothing less than that from an eternity of the past to an eternity of the future the centre of the stage is occupied by the Lamb of God who was slain.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“But even if we remain in our own country, Christians and non-Christians are often widely separated from one another by social sub-cultures and lifestyles as well as by different values, beliefs and moral standards. Only an incarnation can span these divides, for an incarnation means entering other people’s worlds, their thought-world, and the worlds of their alienation, loneliness and pain. Moreover, the incarnation led to the cross. Jesus first took our flesh, then bore our sin. This was a depth of penetration into our world in order to reach us, in comparison with which our little attempts to reach people seem amateur and shallow. The cross calls us to a much more radical and costly kind of evangelism than most churches have begun to consider, let alone experience.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“Christ’s cross. For, whether we like it or not, we are involved. Our sins put him there. So, far from offering us flattery, the cross undermines our self-righteousness. We can stand before it only with a bowed head and a broken spirit. And there we remain until the Lord Jesus speaks to our hearts his word of pardon and acceptance, and we, gripped by his love and full of thanksgiving, go out into the world to live our lives in his service.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“For if there is ‘false guilt’ (feeling bad about evil we have not done), there is also ‘false innocence’ (feeling good about the evil we have done). If false contrition is unhealthy (an ungrounded weeping over guilt), so is false assurance (an ungrounded rejoicing over forgiveness).”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“P. T. Forsyth, the English Congregationalist, wrote in The Cruciality of the Cross (1909): Christ is to us just what his cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what he did there...Christ, I repeat, is to us just what his cross is. You do not understand Christ till you understand his cross. (pp.44–45)”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“What is unhealthy is every wallowing in guilt which does not lead to confession, repentance, faith in Jesus Christ and so forgiveness.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“The same evil passion influences our own contemporary attitudes to Jesus. He is still, as C. S. Lewis called him, ‘a transcendental interferer’.12 We resent his intrusions into our privacy, his demand for our homage, his expectation of our obedience. Why can’t he mind his own business, we ask petulantly, and leave us alone? To which he instantly replies that we are his business and that he will never leave us alone. So we too perceive him as a threatening rival, who disturbs our peace, upsets our status quo, undermines our authority and diminishes our self-respect. We too want to get rid of him.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“If we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in a dictionary, but at Calvary.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“If the Romans regarded crucifixion with horror, so did the Jews, though for a different reason. They made no distinction between a ‘tree’ and a ‘cross’, and so between a hanging and a crucifixion. They therefore automatically applied to crucified criminals the terrible statement of the law that ‘anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse’ (Deut. 21:23). They could not bring themselves to believe that God’s Messiah would die under his curse, strung up on a tree.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“Further, this human responsibility is in the first instance ‘not...a task but a gift,...not law but grace’. It expresses itself in ‘believing, responsive love’ (p.98). So then, ‘one who has understood the nature of responsibility has understood the nature of man. Responsibility is not an attribute, it is the “substance” of human existence. It contains everything..., [it is] that which distinguishes man from all other creatures....’ (p.50). Therefore ‘if responsibility be eliminated, the whole meaning of human existence disappears’ (p.258).”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand The shadow of a mighty rock Within a weary land.... O safe and happy shelter! O refuge tried and sweet! O trysting-place, where heaven’s love And heaven’s justice meet!”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“It is impossible to read the New Testament without being impressed by the atmosphere of joyful confidence which pervades it, and which stands out in relief to the rather jejune religion that often passes for Christianity today. There was no defeatism about the early Christians; they spoke rather of victory.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“the cup from which he shrank was something different. It symbolized neither the physical pain of being flogged and crucified, nor the mental distress of being despised and rejected even by his own people, but rather the spiritual agony of bearing the sins of the world, in other words, of enduring the divine judgment which those sins deserved.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“Christ’s sufferings were not ‘penal sufferings endured in meeting a demand of divine justice’, but ‘the sufferings of divine love suffering from our sins according to its own nature”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“If we are in Christ and therefore justified, we are also the children of God and the true (spiritual) descendants of Abraham.”
― John Stott ,
from The Cross of Christ
“Emotionally, I find the concept [of eternal conscious torment] intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain.”
“Use your sense of humour. Laugh about things, laugh at the absurdities of life, laugh about yourself, and about your own absurdity. We are all of us infinitesimally small and ludicrous creatures within God's universe. You have to be aerious, but never solemn, because if you are solemn about anything, there is the risk of becoming solemn about yourself.”
“We may believe in the deity and the salvation of Christ, and acknowledge ourselves to be sinners in need of his salvation; but this does not make us Christians. We have to make a personal response to Jesus Chris, committing ourselves unreservedly to him as our Savior and Lord.”
“We are terrified to see what fallible, arrogant humanity can do with the hard steel of the absolute standards of right and wrong.”
Group of Brands
© 2026 Bibleportal.com All rights reserved.
John Robert Walmsley Stott is a British Christian leader and Anglican clergyman who is noted as a leader of the worldwide evangelical movement. He is famous as one of the principal authors of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974.
Stott was ordained in 1945 and went on to become a curate at All Souls Church, Langham Place (1945-1950) then rector (1950-75). This was the church in which he had grown up, and in which he has spent almost all of his life, aside from a few years spent in Cambridge.
Stott played a central role at two landmark events in the history of British evangelicalism. He was chairing the National Assembly of Evangelicals in 1966, a convention organised by the Evangelical Alliance, when Martyn Lloyd-Jones made an unexpected call for evangelicals to unite together as evangelicals and no longer within their 'mixed' denominations.