John Stott Quotes

Many (Christians) have zeal without knowledge, enthusiasm without enlightenment. In more modern jargon, they are keen but clueless.

If we truly worship God, acknowledging and adoring his infinite worth, we find ourselves impelled to make him known to others, in order that they may worship him too. Thus worship leads to witness, and witness in its turn to worship, in a perpetual circle.

The nations are not gathered in automatically. If God has promised to bless "all the families of the earth," he has promised to do so "through Abraham's seed" (Genesis 12:3, 22:18). Now we are Abraham's seed by faith, and the earth's families will be blessed only if we go to them with the gospel. That is God's plain purpose.

It is impossible to pray for someone without loving him, and impossible to go on praying for him without discovering that our love for him grows and matures.

Good works are indispensable to salvation - not as its ground or means, however, but as its consequence and evidence.

Simplicity is the first cousin of contentment.

What we need is not more learning, not more eloquence, not more persuasion, not more organization, but more power from the Holy Spirit.

All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God, because it is the adoration of His name.

Christians believe that true worship is the highest and noblest activity of which man, by the grace of God, is capable.

When Jesus is truly our Lord, He directs our lives and we gladly obey Him. Indeed, we bring every part of our lives under His lordship - our home and family, our sexuality and marriage, our job or unemployment, our money and possessions, our ambitions and recreations.

God condemned sin in Christ, so that holiness might appear in us.

Biblical righteousness is more than a private and personal affair; it includes social righteousness as well ... Thus Christians are committed to hunger for righteousness in the whole human community as something pleasing to a righteous God.

Christianity is in its very essence a resurrection religion. The concept of resurrection lies at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed.

Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from His fruit, and no effective witness without His power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.

The reason I am a Christian is not that it is nice, but that it is true.

It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.

The hallmark of an authentic evangelicalism is not the uncritical repetition of old traditions but the willingness to submit every tradition, however ancient, to fresh biblical scrutiny and, if necessary, reform.

I believe that to preach or to expound the scripture is to open up the inspired text with such faithfulness and sensitivity that God's voice is heard and His people obey Him

The Christian's chief occupational hazards are depression and discouragement.

Indignation and compassion form a powerful combination. They are indispensable to vision, and therefore to leadership.

God intends ... our care of Creation to reflect our love for the Creator.

But the Holy Spirit is not in a hurry. Character is the produce of a lifetime.

We cannot be content with an evangelism which does not lead to the drawing of converts into the church, nor with a church order whose principle of cohesion is a superficial social camaraderie instead of a spiritual fellowship with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

Christian giving is to be marked by self-sacrifice and self-forgetfuln ess, not by self-congratula tion.

Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does he sustain it? Has he committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for his own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.

We have the means of evangelizing our country, but they are slumbering in the pews of our churches.

God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us.

Do not be content with a static Christian life. Determine rather to grow in faith and love, in knowledge and holiness.

Apathy is the acceptance of the unacceptable.

Faith is a reasoning trust, a trust which reckons thoughtfully and confidently upon the trustworthiness of God.

There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God.

Although we have responsibilities to others, we are primarily accountable to God. It is before him that we stand, and to him that one day we must give an account. We should not therefore rate human opinion too highly ...

Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his.

We should travel light and live simply. Our enemy is not possessions but excess.

The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought.

The meaning of atonement is not to be found in our penitence evoked by the sight of Calvary, but rather in what God did when in Christ on the cross He took our place and bore our sin.

The chief reason people do not know God is not because He hides from them but because they hide from Him.

The Cross is the blazing fire at which the flame of our love is kindled, but we have to get near enough for its sparks to fall on us.

Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service. If we do not use the mind that God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riches of God's grace.

Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.

An unchurched christian is a grotesque anomaly. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God's new community.

The command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men ... but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God.

The cross is not just a badge to identify us ... it is also the compass which gives us our bearings in a disoriented world.

God has clothed His thoughts in words, and there is no way to know Him except by knowing the Scriptures.

Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony

God must speak to us before we have any liberty to speak to him. He must disclose to us who he is before we can offer him what we are in acceptable worship. The worship of God is always a response to the Word of God. Scripture wonderfully directs and enriches our worship.

Mission arises from the heart of God Himself and is communicated from His heart to ours. Mission is the global outreach of the global people of a global God.

Faith, Hope & Love. Faith is directed towards God, love towards others (both within the Christian fellowship and beyond it) and hope towards the future, in particular, the glorious coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Similarly, faith rests of the past; love works in the present; hope looks to the future. Every Christian without exception is a believer, a lover and a hoper. Faith, hope and love are three sure evidences of regeneration by the Holy Spirit.

The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of its worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified.

Prayer is the very way God Himself has chosen for us to express our conscious need of Him and our humble dependence on Him.

The modern world detests authority but worships relevance. Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance, and that the secret of both is Jesus Christ

Theology is a serious quest for the true knowledge of God, undertaken in response to His self-revelation, illumined by Christian tradition, manifesting a rational inner coherence, issuing in ethical conduct, resonating with the contemporary world and concerned for the greater glory of God.

Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fiber of Christianity. Why is it that those who have no biblical convictions or theology to govern and direct their actions are tolerated and the standard or truth of God's Word rightly divided and applied is dismissed as extreme opinion or legalism?

Christians who neglect the Bible simply do not mature.

Persecution is simply the clash between two irreconcilable value-systems.

There is no Christianity without the cross. If the cross is not central to our religion, ours is not the religion of Jesus.

These then are the marks of the ideal Church - love, suffering, holiness, sound doctrine, genuineness, evangelism and humility. They are what Christ desires to find in His churches as He walks among them.

A deaf church is a dead church: that is an unalterable principle.

Never use a gallon of words to express a spoonful of thought. Our unadorned word should be enough.

Greatness in the kingdom of God is measured in terms of obedience.

Nobody can call himself a Christian who does not worship Jesus.

When we look at the cross we see the justice, love, wisdom and power of God. It is not easy to decide which is the most luminously revealed, whether the justice of God in judging sin, or the love of God in bearing the judgment in our place, or the wisdom of God in perfectly combining the two, or the power of God in saving those who believe. For the cross is equally an act, and therefore a demonstration, of God's justice, love, wisdom and power. The cross assures us that this God is the reality within, behind and beyond the universe.

For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God [Gen. 3:1-7], while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man [2 Cor. 5:21]. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.

Don't neglect your critical faculties. Remember that God is a rational God, who has made us in His own image. God invites and expects us to explore His double revelation, in nature and Scripture, with the minds He has given us, and to go on in the development of a Christian mind to apply His marvellous revealed truth to every aspect of the modern and post-modern world.

Pride is more than the first of the seven deadly sins; it is itself the essence of all sin.

What I believe to be one of the major tragedies in the Church today. Namely, that evangelicals are biblical, but not contemporary, while liberals are contemporary but not biblical, and almost nobody is building bridges and relating the biblical text to the modern context

Truth without love is too hard; love without truth is too soft.

The chief occupational hazard of leadership is pride.

Speaking personally, I find it helpful to detect in the four evangelists four dimensions of the saving purpose of God: its length, depth, breadth and height. Matthew reveals its length, for he depicts the Christ of Scripture, who looks back over long-centuries of expectation. Mark emphasizes its depth, for he depicts the Suffering Servant who looks down to the depths of the humiliation he endured. In Luke it is the breadth of God's purpose which emerges, for he depicts the Savior of the world who looks round in mercy to the broadest possible spectrum of human beings. Then John reveals its height, for he depicts the Word made flesh who looks up to the heights from which he came and to which he intends to raise us.

A man who loves his wife will love her letters and her photographs because they speak to him of her. So if we love the Lord Jesus, we shall love the Bible because it speaks to us of him.

I have never been able to conjure up (as some great Evangelical missionaries have) the appalling vision of the millions who are not only perishing but will inevitably perish. On the other hand ... I am not and cannot be a universalist. Between these extremes I cherish and hope the majority of the human race will be be saved. And I have a solid biblical basis for this belief.

Grace is love that cares and stoops and rescues.

If we love our neighbor we shall without doubt tell him the good news of Jesus. But equally if we truly love our neighbor we shall not stop there.

It is no exaggeration to say that without Scripture a Christian life is impossible.

The first and great evidence of our walking by the Spirit or being filled with the Spirit is not some private mystical experience of our own, but our practical relationships of love with other people.

Ambitions for self may be quite modest ... Ambitions for God, however, if they are to be worthy, can never be modest. There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God. How can we ever be content that he should acquire just a little more honour in the world? No. Once we are clear that God is King, then we long to see him crowned with glory and honour, and accorded his true place, which is the supreme place. We become ambitious for the spread of his kingdom and righteousness everywhere.

The major mark of justified believers is joy, especially joy in God himself. We should be the most positive people in the world. For the new community of Jesus Christ is characterized not by a self-centered triumphalism but by a God-centered worship.

The gospel creates the church, which spreads the gospel, which creates more churches, which in turn spread the gospel further ad infinitum.

Lord Jesus, I pray that this day I may take up my cross and follow you.

A Christian should resemble a fruit tree with real fruit, not a Christmas tree with decorations tied on

God continues to speak through what He has spoken.

The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ's achievement. The law makes demands and bids us obey; the gospel brings promises and bids us believe.

The question is not so much what the hand is doing (passing over some cash or a check) but what the heart is thinking while the hand is doing it.

Our claim is that God has revealed Himself by speaking; that this divine (or God-breathed) speech has been written down and preserved in Scripture; and that Scripture is, in fact, God's Word written, which therefore is true and reliable and has divine authority over men.

We live and die; Christ died and lived!