R.C. Sproul Quotes

God is working in us for his good pleasure. Paul does not say that God is working in us for our good pleasure.

We are secure, not because we hold tightly to Jesus, but because He holds tightly to us.

In His tender mercies, God has an incredible capacity to love the unlovely.

It is superstitious to equate our feelings and inclinations with the leading of the Holy Spirit.

What accounts for Luther's behavior? One things is certain: Whatever defense mechanisms normal people have to mute the accusing voice of conscience, Luther was lacking.

It is easy to get faith into our heads. It is hard to get faith into our bloodstream.

No one was ever called by God to greater suffering than God's only begotten Son.

My purposes do not always include God's good. I am a sinner.

God's kingdom will never come where His name is not considered holy.

Perhaps the most difficult task for us to perform is to rely on God's grace and God's grace alone for our celebration. It is difficult for our pride to rest on grace. Grace is for other people - for beggars. We don't want to live by a heavenly welfare system. We want to earn our own way and atone for our own sins. We like to think that we will go to heaven because we deserve to be there.

At the fall, we became alienated not only from God and other people but also from ourselves.

To solve a marriage problem, you have to talk with each other about it, choosing wisely the time and place. But when accusations and lengthy speeches of defense fill the dialogue, the partners are not talking to each other but past each other. Take care to listen more than you speak. If you still can't agree on a solution, consider asking a third party, without a vested interest, to mediate.

Jesus' life was a storm of controversy. The apostles, like the prophets before them, could hardly go a day without controversy. Paul said that he debated daily in the marketplace. To avoid controversy is to avoid Christ. We can have peace, but it is a servile and carnal peace where truth is slain in the streets.

The gospel of Jesus Christ must be defended in every generation. It is always the center of attack by the forces of evil.

When you struggle with your faith, when you face the dark night of the soul, when you are not sure of where you
stand with the things of God, flee to the Scriptures. It is from those pages that God the Holy Spirit will speak to you, minister to your soul, and strengthen the faith that He gave to you in the first place.

If we are going to deal with the discipline of Bible study, we must recognize at the outset that we will need the grace of God to persevere.

The attention at the beginning of these petitions is on the exaltation of God and His concerns. In the initial phrases of the Lord's Prayer, Jesus fixes our gaze not on ourselves but on God.
People

Everything we learn - economics, philosophy, biology, mathematics - has to be understood in light of the overarching reality of the character of God. That is why, in the Middle Ages, theology was called "the queen of the sciences" and philosophy "her handmaiden." Today the queen has been deposed from her throne and, in many cases, driven into exile, and a supplanter now reigns. We have replaced theology with religion.

We experience the grace of an infinite God, but grace is not infinite.

Anyone who takes his faith seriously and speaks in behalf of Christ and His kingdom will be accused of fanaticism at some point.

The higher purpose of the cross was that the Father would be glorified by the satisfaction of His justice.

Even if it cannot be
proven that a fetus is an actual living human person, there is no doubt that it is a potential living human person. In other words, a fetus is a developing person. It is not in a frozen state of potentiality. The fetus is in dynamic process-without interference or unforeseen calamity, it surely will become a fully actualized living human person.

The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God.

I rest solely in His righteousness and in His atonement because I know there is nothing I can do to make up for my own iniquity.

God wants your life. Not one hour a week, not 10% of your income, He wants you.

them incognito. They presumed to inform Jesus about the events of the crucifixion and showed obvious impatience with His apparent ignorance of the matters. When they related the report of the women concerning the resurrection, Christ rebuked them:
"O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
When the two had their eyes opened

We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.

Confession should be a daily activity for the Christian, whose entire pilgrimage is characterized by the spirit of repentance.

The Bible teaches us again and again that we are slaves to sin. Sin is not only in our nature, but it is our master.

Every person needs to feel significant. We want our lives to count. We yearn to believe that in some way we are important and that hunger for significance-a drive as intense as our need for oxygen-doesn't come from pride or ego. It comes from God because he wants each of us to understand how important we are ... We must seek our roots, our origin, and our destiny so that we can know our present value ... We can help each other realize that we are persons of significance being made in the image of God.

Because of Christ, our suffering is not useless. It is part of the total plan of God, who has chosen to redeem the world through the pathway of suffering.

We are cosmic traitors. We must recognize this problem within ourselves if we are to grasp the necessity of the cross.

But when the Holy Spirit does His mysterious work of regeneration, the first thing that changes in a person is the disposition of his or her soul. Now he cares for the things of God and desires to seek God. Now there is an affection for God that was not there before. It is far from perfect, but it is real. Its origins and its power remain mysterious. But the reality is that the person's heart is beating for God, whereas it never did before. This is the undeniable effect of the blowing of the Pneuma through the soul.

We are not doomed to an ultimate conflict with no hope of resolution. The message of the Scripture is one of victory - full, final and ultimate victory. It is not our doom that is certain, but Satan's. His head has been crushed by the heel of Christ, who is the Alpha and Omega.

The house that is built upon the sand will crumble at the first sign of a windstorm.

Truth may be mysterious, indeed even paradoxical, but never, never, never contradictory.

The human dilemma is this: God is Holy and we are not. God is Righteous and we are not.

If God says, 'I forgive you,' you are forgiven no matter how you feel, and to refuse that forgiveness is an act of arrogance.

If ever there were a time there was nothing, there would be nothing now.

True prayer presupposes an attitude of humble submission and adoration to the Almighty God.

The very heart of worship, as the Bible makes clear, is the business of expressing, from the depths of our spirits, the highest possible honor we can offer before God.

When God issues a call to us, it is always a holy call. The vocation of dying is a sacred vocation. To understand that is one of the most important lessons a Christian can ever learn. When the summons comes, we can respond in many ways. We can become angry, bitter or terrified. But if we see it as a call from God and not a threat from Satan, we are far more prepared to cope with its difficulties.

It certainly takes grace to able to find joy in our hearts when people are experiencing joy over a gain that is, in some way, our loss. This involves more than just baseball games. It involves countless things that touch our daily lives. But God enables us as Christians to look at things not just from our own selfish perspectives but from the perspectives of others.

Change marriage and you change the world. Convince people that government, not God, lays down the rules for marriage, and they will believe more strongly that they determine right and wrong, that not even the world's rulers are subject to a higher authority.

God is inseparably linked to the coming of Pentecost. In a certain sense, Jesus lacked the authority to dispatch the Spirit prior to His ascension.

Real conversion is an experience of repentance and forgiveness before God. It is not merely praying a prayer, joining a Christian church, or receiving a sacrament. It is being brought to our knees by the conviction of God the Holy Spirit.

Christ told his disciples not to be anxious about tomorrow, but he never said not to consider tomorrow. Intelligent problem solving demands careful consideration of the future effects of present solutions.

The moment we think we deserve mercy a little alarm bell should go off in our head because we are not talking about mercy anymore but justice.

In the decade of the 1980s, a massive and comprehensive study of religion in American life was undertaken by the Gallup organization. The results of the study were as terrifying as they were revealing. Americans, even evangelical Americans, are woefully ignorant of the content of Scripture and even more ignorant of the history of Christianity and classical Christian theology.

We have all heard evangelists quote from Revelation: "I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him and he with Me." Usually the evangelist applies this text as an appeal to the unconverted, saying, 'Jesus is knocking at the door of your heart. If you open the door, he will come in.' In the original saying, however, Jesus directed his remarks to the church. It was not an evangelistic appeal.

So what? The point is that seeking is something that unbelievers do not do on their own steam. The unbeliever will not seek. The unbeliever will not knock. Seeking is the business of believers. Edwards said, "The seeking of the kingdom of God is the chief business of the Christian life." Seeking is the RESULT of faith, not the cause of it.

It is the Holy Spirit who inspired the Bible. It is the Holy Spirit who illumines the Bible.

I don't always feel His presence. But God's promises do not depend upon my feelings; they rest upon His integrity.

We have a tendency to think of GOD being glorified only in the manifestation of his mercy
He is just as glorified by His justice.

It is precisely the presence and help of Christ in times of suffering that makes it possible for us to stand up under pressure.

I cannot read God's mind, however I can read God's Word.

When people ask me to name the Ligonier teaching material they should use to help them grow; I tell them, 'You should start with The Holiness of God.'

Isn't is amazing that almost everyone has an opinion to offer about the Bible, and yet so few have studied it?

Galleries of this world. These images are often so conflicting that they offer little help in achieving an accurate picture of what Christ looked like during the period of His incarnation. This multiplicity

Disciples of Christ abide in His Word. Those who abide in His Word know the truth and are free.

Those who understand God's sovereignty have joy even in the midst of suffering, a joy reflected on their very faces, for they see that their suffering is not without purpose.

The cliche is that misery loves company. Another is that there is fellowship among thieves. But thieves do not seek the consoling presence of the fellowship of police officers. Sinful misery does not love the company of purity.

To live in coram Deo is to live in the presence of God, being ruled by His authority for the glory of His name.

Was Luther crazy? Perhaps. But if he was, our prayer is that God would send to this earth an epidemic of such insanity that we too may taste of the righteousness that is by faith alone.

We have a generation of people who think they can stand before the judgment seat of God despite their sins.

If the being of God ceased for one second, the universe would disappear.

Do you not know that God dwells in light inaccessible? We weak and ignorant creatures want to probe and understand the incomprehensible majesty of the unfathomable light of the wonder of God. We approach; we prepare ourselves to approach. What wonder then that his majesty overpowers us and shatters!'-

Scripture does not say that God is 'love, love, love' or that He is 'wrath, wrath, wrath,' but that He is 'holy, holy, holy.'

The clearest sensation that a human being has when he experiences the holy is an overpowering and overwhelming sense of creatureliness. That is, when we are in the presence of God, we are humbled and become most aware of ourselves as creatures. This is the opposite of Satan's original temptation, You shall be as gods.

Luther examined the Great Commandment, "'Live the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all yor strength and with all your mind.'; and, 'Love yor neighbor as yourself'" (Luke 10:27) Then he asked himself, What is the Great Trangression?" Some answer this question by saying that great sin is murder, adultery, blasphemy, or unbelief. Luther disagreed. He concluded that if the Great Commandment was to live Gid with all the heart, than the Great Transgression was to fail to love God with all the heart. He saw a balance between great obligations and great sins.

Wealth is not wisdom's goal, but is often wisdom's reward.

I would counsel her to maintain the pregnancy on the grounds that the developing baby within her is a co-victim
of the rapist's heinous crime. To kill the fetus, who is innocent of the offense, is to add insult to injury.

James 1:13 specifically says that God tempts no one. God may test, but He never tempts to evil. A test is for growth; temptation is toward evil. Not

It's because Jesus spoke so frequently about hell that the church should take the concept seriously.

We do not determine right or wrong based on what everybody else is doing.

There's a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

If we are to be biblical, then, the issue is not whether we should have a doctrine of predestination or not, but what kind we should embrace.

To reduce the demands of God's law is to do violence to the holiness of God. To inflate one's own self-assessment to the point of self-delusion is an extreme form of pride.

To focus our mind on the task at hand-with fierce concentration-m akes for a productive use of time.

God doesn't need our consent in order to govern us; He made us.

God doesn't want us to just feel gratitude, but for us to show it by giving thanks to God with our lives.

Somewhere, somehow, something must have the power of being. If not, we are left with only two options: (1) being comes from nothing or (2) nothing is (a contradiction). These options would be more miraculous than miracles if such were possible.
Some

Right now counts forever.

Humanism was not invented by man, but by a snake who suggested that the quest for autonomy might be a good idea.

Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him ... To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls.

What about putting Christ back into Christmas? It is simply not necessary. Christ has never left Christmas.

Faith is the means by which the righteousness of Christ is given to us.

If you don't believe that God ordains everything that comes to pass, you don't believe in God." I

The grounds of your justification are the perfect works of Jesus Christ. We're saved by works, but they're not our own.

What does God expect of His children who are married or thinking about getting married? God expects, among other things, faithfulness to the marriage partner, provision of mutual needs, and mutual respect under the lordship of Christ. Certainly the couple should enhance each other's effectiveness as Christians. If not, something is wrong.

Most Christians salute the sovereignty of God but believe in the sovereignty of man.

We may go to the house of mirth, to a party, where we have fun, kick back, have a good time, and enjoy entertainment. Parties are not all that serious; we don't have to be contemplative in order to enjoy ourselves there. Certainly there is a time to laugh, a time to dance, a time to celebrate-a time to have a party. But how much do we learn in those circumstances? Times of mirth do very little for the good of our souls.

It's easy to be an educated fool.

Why would the disciples invent a God whose holiness was more terrifying than the forces of nature that provoked them to invent a god in the first place?

It is a profound political reality that Christ now occupies the supreme seat of cosmic authority. The kings of this world and all secular governments may ignore this reality, but they cannot undo it. The universe is no democracy. It is a monarchy. God himself has appointed his beloved Son as the preeminent King. Jesus does not rule by referendum, but by divine right. In the future every knee will bow before him, either willingly or unwillingly. Those who refuse to do so will have their knees broken with a rod of iron.

The most violent expression of God's wrath and justice is seen in the Cross. If ever a person had room to complain for injustice, it was Jesus. He was the only innocent man ever to be punished by God. If we stagger at the wrath of God, let us stagger at the Cross. Here is where our astonishment should be focused.

What prayer most often changes is the wickedness and the hardness of our own hearts. That alone would be reason enough to pray, even if none of the other reasons were valid or true.

The Spirit inspired the Word when it originally was written. Today, He uses it to illumine us, and He applies it to our souls and hearts.

Justification is by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone.

I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed it - His Word. He alone has the power to change lives for eternity, and that power is focused on the Scriptures.

Reformed theology does NOT teach that God brings the ELECT kicking and screaming, against their will, into His kingdom. It teaches that God so-works in the hearts of the Elect as to make them willing and pleased to come to Christ. They come to Christ because they want to. They want to because God has created in their hearts a desire for Christ.