Top 96 D. A. Carson Quotes
#2. There is no long-range effective teaching of the Bible that is not accompanied by long hours of ongoing study of the Bible.
D. A. Carson
#3. Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.
D. A. Carson
#4. The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.
D. A. Carson
#5. Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ
D. A. Carson
#6. Godliness rests in submission to the Almighty's will, not in intercession that seeks to change that will.
D. A. Carson
#7. The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God's story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible.
D. A. Carson
#8. Postmodernism is an outlook that depends not a little on what are perceived to be the fundamental limitations on the power of interpretation: that is, since interpretation can never be more than my interpretation or our interpretation, no purely objective stance is possible.
D. A. Carson
#9. It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
D. A. Carson
#10. The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better.
D. A. Carson
#11. Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
D. A. Carson
#12. True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us
D. A. Carson
#13. No one believes more strongly than I do that every Christian should be a theologian. In that sense, we all need to work it out. I want all Christians who can read, to read their Bibles and to read beyond the Bible - to read the history and theology.
D. A. Carson
#14. God's love in John 3:16 is not amazing because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad.
D. A. Carson
#15. It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.
D. A. Carson
#16. To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.
D. A. Carson
#17. Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers.
D. A. Carson
#18. Sex is about timing. The world says: any time, any place. God says: my time, my place.
D. A. Carson
#19. Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
D. A. Carson
#20. What we actually do reflects our highest priorities. That means we can proclaim our commitment to prayer until the cows come home, but unless we actually pray, our actions disown our words.
D. A. Carson
#21. Good praying is more easily caught than taught.
D. A. Carson
#22. Prayer is God's appointed means for appropriating the blessings that are ours in Christ Jesus.
D. A. Carson
#23. Unchecked, the new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains.
D. A. Carson
#24. One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most "evangelistic" movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.
D. A. Carson
#25. God may normally work through ordinary means. But he is not limited by them. That is why all the military muscle in the world cannot itself guarantee victory, and all the secularization, postmodernism, naturalism, and paganism in the world cannot by themselves prevent revival. Let God be God.
D. A. Carson
#26. Some forms of absolutism are not bad; they may even be heroic.
D. A. Carson
#27. Indeed, if we have experienced anything of the Father's bountiful forgiveness his mercy must become the standard of our own:
D. A. Carson
#28. God has graciously called us; now we must live up to that calling. That cannot mean less than that we should become increasingly holy, self-denying, loving, full of integrity, steeped in the knowledge of God and his Word, delighted to trust and obey our heavenly Father.
D. A. Carson
#29. To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.
D. A. Carson
#30. God is a talking God, and thus you must come to wrestle with him. You must wrestle with what he said.
D. A. Carson
#31. Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.
D. A. Carson
#32. Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.
D. A. Carson
#33. We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray.
D. A. Carson
#34. Either worrying drives out prayer, or prayer drives out worrying.
D. A. Carson
#35. If we remember what we have been called to and devote ourselves to praying for what is best, we may care a little less about the opinions of a secular world and devote ourselves more scrupulously to serving the only Master whose opinion matters.
D. A. Carson
#36. In our day, deception becomes all the easier to arrange because so many Christians are no longer greatly shaped by Scripture. It is difficult to unmask subtle error when it aligns with the culture, deploys spiritual God-talk, piously cites a passage or two, and "works.
D. A. Carson
#37. The unvarnished truth is that what we most frequently give thanks for betrays what we most highly value. If a large percentage of our thanksgiving is for material prosperity, it is because we value material prosperity proportionately.
D. A. Carson
#38. A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen.
D. A. Carson
#39. Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far removed from idolatry. The
D. A. Carson
#40. If the text is God's Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience.
D. A. Carson
#41. We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb.
D. A. Carson
#42. Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship, worship rather than worship God.
D. A. Carson
#43. Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.
D. A. Carson
#44. God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never mitigates human responsibility.
D. A. Carson
#45. You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.
D. A. Carson
#46. The sole heresy has become the view that there is such a thing as heresy.
D. A. Carson
#47. The initial impetus to cross lines of race and heritage with the Gospel of Jesus Christ arose not from a committee planning world evangelization, but from God himself.
D. A. Carson
#48. It is always much more difficult for Christians to detect a fundamentally sinful attitude in other Christians than in pagans - especially if that attitude is endemic to contemporary society, thereby reducing or eliminating the "shock" force of that sin.
D. A. Carson
#49. If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one, it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.
D. A. Carson
#50. All of us would be wiser if we would resolve never to put people down, except on our prayer lists.
D. A. Carson
#51. I do think that there is a hunger in the land for a vision of confessional Christianity that is robust, God-centered, tough-minded, able to address today and tomorrow and the next day, and comprehensive.
D. A. Carson
#52. The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
D. A. Carson
#53. The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross.
D. A. Carson
#54. The worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.
D. A. Carson
#55. Moreover, if we joyfully confess the lordship of Christ, then when we ask what is best for people our answers will be cast in terms of what he thinks is best for people, not necessarily what people think is best for themselves.
D. A. Carson
#56. When we live up to our calling, we remember that in God's church people do not set the agenda, they are the agenda.
D. A. Carson
#57. When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery. Will there also be faith? Yes, if our attention is focused more on the cross, and on the God of the cross, than on the suffering itself.
D. A. Carson
#58. The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it.
D. A. Carson
#59. That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble.
D. A. Carson
#60. genuinely righteous people invariably become more aware of their personal guilt and need for forgiveness than those who have become so foul and hard they cannot detect their own shame.
D. A. Carson
#61. To assume the gospel in one generation is to lose it in the next.
D. A. Carson
#62. Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.
D. A. Carson
#63. A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.
D. A. Carson
#64. Moreover, although the people are guilty, Peter understands that it was precisely through the evil execution of Jesus that "God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer" (3:18). That is the supreme irony of all history.
D. A. Carson
#65. The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.
D. A. Carson
#66. The heart of all idolatry in the Bible is the de-godding of God.
D. A. Carson
#67. The way you lose the gospel is not by denying it, but by assuming it.
D. A. Carson
#68. How much would our churches be transformed if each of us made it a practice to thank God for others and then to tell those others what it is about them that we thank God for?
D. A. Carson
#69. There needs to be a place in the church or just outside - there needs to be a place where people feel free to ask questions without being put upon, where they feel free to ask difficult, challenging questions to voice their skepticism.
D. A. Carson
#70. In any Christian view of life, self-fulfillment must never be permitted to become the controlling issue. The issue is service, the service of real people. The question is, 'How can I be most useful?', not, 'How can I feel most useful?'
D. A. Carson
#71. Do you wish to see God's love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God's wrath? Look at the cross.
D. A. Carson
#72. Our prayers may be an index of how small and self-centered our world is.
D. A. Carson
#73. Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back.
D. A. Carson
#74. If you want to see what judgment looks like, go to the cross. If you want to see what love looks like, go to the cross.
D. A. Carson
#75. Effectiveness in teaching the Bible is purchased at the price of much study, some of it lonely, all of it tiring.
D. A. Carson
#76. A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.
D. A. Carson
#77. Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God's love, they cannot escape the cross.
D. A. Carson
#78. Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death.
D. A. Carson
#79. This is not the place to anticipate the discussion, but two things may usefully be said. First, all but the most sanguine pluralists admit that there are immense dangers ahead and that signs of cultural decay abound.
D. A. Carson
#80. The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin
D. A. Carson
#81. The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him.
D. A. Carson
#82. Prayer will never descend to the level where it is nothing more than a retreat house in which we find strength for ourselves,
D. A. Carson
#83. Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. We do not drift into spiritual life; we do not drift into disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. That means we must self-consciousl y set aside time to do nothing but pray.
D. A. Carson
#84. We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God's.
D. A. Carson
#85. Biblical preaching emphasizes the gospel and constantly elevates Christ crucified. But it also recognizes that the cross is not only our creed, it is the standard of our ministry.
D. A. Carson
#86. The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer.
D. A. Carson
#87. The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.
D. A. Carson
#88. A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross.
D. A. Carson
#89. Sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances, rather than change our circumstances.
D. A. Carson
#90. He is utterly sovereign over his created order, yet he is nothing less than personal as he deals with me. Sometimes it is more important to worship such a God than to understand him.
D. A. Carson
#91. There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
D. A. Carson
#92. Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like.
D. A. Carson
#94. The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.
D. A. Carson
#95. The Gospel itself is angular. It always has been. It always conflicts. It always challenges every generation. It challenges different generations in different ways.
D. A. Carson
#96. Justice is not always done in this world; we see that everyday. But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying, "This isn't fair."
D. A. Carson
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