Steven J. Lawson Quotes

If you miss Christ you miss everything, and if you have Christ you have everything.

We do not merely add Jesus Christ to our lives and continue in the same direction. Following Christ means we stop, turn around, and pursue Him.

If we want revivals, we must revive our reverence for the Word of God. If we want conversions, we must put more of God's Word into our sermons.8 His gospel preaching was grounded

Salvation is not a reward for the righteous, it is a gift for the guilty.

By grace (that is to say, by favor) we are plucked out of Adam, the ground of all evil, and grafted in Christ, the root of all goodness.28 You are chosen for Christ's sake to the inheritance of eternal life.29

All pulpits must passionately declare Christ to be the eternal Son of the living God, the only Savior of sinners. All preaching must boldly announce Him as the reigning Lord of heaven and earth. He must be fearlessly announced as the One before whom every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. All preaching must assert that this Jesus is the final Judge of every human life. To fulfill this sacred duty, every preacher must proclaim the full counsel of God. Every doctrine in Scripture must be delivered. Every truth must be taught. Every sin must be exposed. Every warning must be issued. And every promise must be offered. If God is to bless our preaching, the supreme majesty of Jesus Christ Himself must be expounded in our sermons. All the lines of our preaching must intersect at this highest pinnacle - Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Where God has put a period, the devil puts a question mark, casting doubt.

Romans gave Luther his theology, but it was the Psalms that gave him his thunder.

Better to have small faith in a great God than to have great faith in a small god.

Some Christians live in such fear, they act as if they believe in the sovereignty of Satan rather than the sovereignty of God.

None of us can ever humble ourselves too much.

If you do not receive Christ as the Lamb who saves and delivers, you will face Him as the Lion who stalks and devours.

Every decision and direction must come under this overarching goal of bringing glory to God.

Predestination ... and salvation are clean taken out of our hands, and put in the hands of God only ... for we are so weak and so uncertain, that if it stood in us, there would of a truth be no man saved; the devil, no doubt, would deceive us.23

No preacher, regardless of where he serves, is free to reinvent preaching.

The high ground of Christ & Him crucified must be claimed in our preaching. Any other footing is a slippery slope that inevitably descends downward into vain rhetoric and mere words. To the contrary, every pulpit must present a towering vision of the unique person and saving work of Jesus Christ. All preaching must point to His sin-bearing, substitutionary death for sinners. All exposition must lift up this Sacrificial Lamb who became a sin-bearing Substitute for all who believe. Every message must exalt this Christ, who was raised from the dead, exalted to the right hand of God the Father, and entrusted with all authority in heaven and earth.

The law and will of the devil is written as well in our hearts as in our members, and we run headlong after the devil with full zeal, and the whole swing of all the power we have; as a stone cast up into the air comes down naturally of his own self, with all the violence and swing of his own weight.15

The pastor who cares about the spiritual growth of his people must make God and His Word the centerpiece of his ministry.

The voice of Christ is so powerful that it awakens the spiritually dead in the grave of sin to hear it and live.

Until we have the right knowledge of God, the knowledge of self and our need for grace remains distorted.

In the race of faith, stay focused upon Christ, not the other runners, nor the spectators.

All men of God must take forth the banner of truth, and once more valiantly proclaim the magnificent sovereignty of God in man's regeneration. May such preaching ring from pulpits today.

Faith only glances at problems, but gazes upon Jesus.

The heart of the new birth is the new birth of the heart.

When God calls, it has the intensity of a shout and the authority of a summons. When He calls, He secures His own desired results.

In Christ God loved us, His elect and chosen, before the world began, and reserved us unto the knowledge of his Son and of His holy gospel.30

No one goes to heaven by parroting a prayer, being baptized, or joining a church, but by believing in Jesus Christ with humble submission.

The essence of Christianity is centered upon the Lord Jesus Christ. The sum and substance of being a Christian is trusting Christ with the entirety of one's being. The height of the Christian life is adoring Christ, the depth of it loving Him, the breadth of it obeying Him, and the length of it following Him. Everything in the Christian life revolves around Jesus Christ. Simply put, Christianity is Christ.

Unless the Holy Ghost blesses the Word, we who preach the gospel are of all men most miserable, for we have attempted a task that is impossible. We have entered on a sphere where nothing but the supernatural will ever avail. If the Holy Spirit does not renew the hearts of our hearers, we cannot do it. If the Holy Ghost does not regenerate them, we cannot. If He does not send the truth home into their souls, we might as well speak into the ear of a corpse.

For Edwards, George Claghorn writes, the "Resolutions" were "neither pious hopes, romantic dreams, nor legalistic rules."4 Instead, they were intensely positive and practical, comprising "instructions for life, maxims to be followed in all respects."5 The "Resolutions" reveal Edwards' "strong sense of duty and discipline, in private and public matters, in intellect and spirituality."6 Collectively, they form an emphatic statement, Stephen Nichols notes, of how he sought to "chart out his life - his relationships, his conversations, his desires, his activities."7

We do not sit in authority over the Scripture, the Scripture sits in authority over us.

Preaching with his whole heart, Whitefield was fully engaged in all that he said. That is why on one occasion he told his listeners, "I shall return home with a heavy heart, unless some of you will arise and come to my Jesus; I desire to preach Him and not myself; rest not in hearing and following me."54 With that, he begged and pleaded with his listeners to believe upon Christ and be saved. It is this kind of passionate preaching that we need again in this present hour. We could certainly do with fewer stale, exegetical lectures in the pulpit. Save these for the classroom. We could do with fewer frivolous, lighthearted personalities in the pulpit. Instead, what is desperately needed in this day are more intensely urgent pleas and pressing appeals as exemplified by this gifted evangelist, George Whitefield.

The pursuit of holiness is always on the path of obedience to the Word, never apart from it.

With arms outstretched on the cross. Jesus took holy God in one hand and sinful man with the other and brought the two together.

O step into the pulpit is to enter onto holy ground. To stand behind an open Bible demands no trifling with sacred things. To be a spokesman for God requires utmost concern and care in handling and proclaiming the Word. Rightly does Scripture warn, "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness" (James 3:1).

There is a vast difference between merely knowing about Christ and actually knowing Him-the difference between heaven and hell.

The Word of God judges the thoughts. The word "judge" means to critique, to be or act as a critic. This is to say that Scripture is able to accurately audit a person's life and size it up for what it is. The Word of God is able to examine the unseen attitudes and motivations, expose the secret ambitions and desires, and then render the divine verdict. Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks upon the heart. This sharp, two-edged sword is able to penetrate into the hidden crevices of the heart and judge what only God can see. The Word makes known what we alone know about ourselves - and often what we do not yet know of ourselves. Scripture plunges deep into the unseen places of the human spirit and judges the private matters of the heart. Only the razor-sharp Word of God can do this.

Whatever your Bible translation is, it stands on the shoulders of one man - William Tyndale.

Hell is a real place, more real than the city in which you live, much hotter and more populated.

God will honor the preaching that honors Christ, but abandon the pulpit that abandons Him.

Grace has uprooted us from a barren wilderness of sin and transplanted us by streams of living water.

Expository preaching consists in the explanation and application of a passage of Scripture. Without explanation it is not expository; without application it is not preaching.32

The more we grow to know God, the more we realize how little we know of Him.

Suffering is not an elective; it is a core course in the University of Life.

If you are only born once, you will die twice. But if you are born twice, you will only die once.

As you preach, stay in the text, give honor to Christ and He will use you

New truth is old heresy.

What is clear is that a spiritually dead sinner contributes nothing - except his sin - to His salvation, not even his faith.

If Christ is not everything, He is nothing. He who has Christ has everything.

At the cross, the worst about us-our sins-was laid upon Christ, and the best about Him-His righteousness-was laid upon us.

There is a kind of preaching that God blesses, specifically the proclamation that exalts the crucified Christ by the power of the Spirit. Conversely, there is a kind of preaching that God does not bless, a mere echoing of man's empty wisdom that is devoid of Christ.

If you're saved and you're breathing, you need to know who William Tyndale is.