Top 100 John Stott Quotes
#1. Every powerful movement has had its philosophy which has gripped the mind, fired the imagination and captured the devotion of its adherents.
John Stott
#2. We do not need to wait for the Holy Spirit to come: he came on the day of Pentecost. He has never left the church.
John Stott
#3. 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.
John Stott
#4. 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
John Stott
#5. Good works are indispensable to salvation - not as its ground or means, however, but as its consequence and evidence.
John Stott
#6. Circumcision stands for a religion of human achievement, of what man can do by his own good works; Christ stands for a religion of divine achievement, of what God has done through the finished work of Christ.
John Stott
#7. Pride is more than the first of the seven deadly sins; it is itself the essence of all sin.
John Stott
#8. The cross is not just a badge to identify us ... it is also the compass which gives us our bearings in a disoriented world.
John Stott
#9. We are sent into the world, like Jesus, to serve. For this is the natural expression of our love for our neighbors. We love. We go. We serve.
John Stott
#10. 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.
John Stott
#11. Persecution is simply the clash between two irreconcilable value-systems.
John Stott
#12. 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.
John Stott
#13. Many (Christians) have zeal without knowledge, enthusiasm without enlightenment. In more modern jargon, they are keen but clueless.
John Stott
#14. Simplicity is the first cousin of contentment.
John Stott
#15. I have sometimes called this 'double listening'. Listening to the voice of God in Scripture, and listening to the voices of the modern world, with all their cries of anger, pain and despair.
John Stott
#16. We should travel light and live simply. Our enemy is not possessions but excess.
John Stott
#17. 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.
John Stott
#18. 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.
John Stott
#19. A deaf church is a dead church: that is an unalterable principle.
John Stott
#20. 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.
John Stott
#21. God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us.
John Stott
#22. Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.
John Stott
#23. God continues to speak through what He has spoken.
John Stott
#24. There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God.
John Stott
#25. A Christian's freedom from anxiety is not due to some guaranteed freedom from trouble, but to the folly of worry and especially to the confidence that God is our Father, that even permitted suffering is within the orbit of His care.
John Stott
#26. There is no Christianity without the cross. If the cross is not central to our religion, ours is not the religion of Jesus.
John Stott
#27. 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.
John Stott
#28. Do not be content with a static Christian life. Determine rather to grow in faith and love, in knowledge and holiness.
John Stott
#29. The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought.
John Stott
#30. 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.
John Stott
#31. We are to be strong in faith, and soft in love.
John Stott
#32. 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
John Stott
#33. If the first mark of a true and living church is love, the second is
suffering. The one is naturally consequent on the other. A
willingness to suffer proves the genuineness of love.
John Stott
#34. A gift is acceptable according to what the giver has, not according to what he has not.
John Stott
#35. Instead of inflicting upon us the judgment we deserved, God in Christ endured it in our place.
John Stott
#36. Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony
John Stott
#37. The chief reason people do not know God is not because He hides from them but because they hide from Him.
John Stott
#38. Christianity is in its very essence a resurrection religion. The concept of resurrection lies at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed.
John Stott
#39. The good news is the gospel of God, about Christ, according to Scripture, for the nations, unto the obedience of faith, and for the sake of the Name.
John Stott
#40. The authority by which the Christian leader leads is not power but love, not force but example, not coercion but reasoned persuasion. Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.
John Stott
#41. 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.
John Stott
#42. 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.
John Stott
#43. 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.
John Stott
#44. Grace is love that cares and stoops and rescues.
John Stott
#45. God intends ... our care of Creation to reflect our love for the Creator.
John Stott
#46. The essence of apostasy is changing sides from that of the crucified to that of the crucifier.
John Stott
#47. A Christian should resemble a fruit tree with real fruit, not a Christmas tree with decorations tied on
John Stott
#48. Faith's only function is to receive what grace offers.
John Stott
#49. No man preaches his sermon well to others if he does not first preach it to his own heart.
John Stott
#50. Here's how to determine God's will for your life: Go wherever your gifts will be exploited the most.
John Stott
#51. The chief occupational hazard of leadership is pride.
John Stott
#52. The gospel is NOT preached if Christ is not preached.
John Stott
#53. Prayer is the very way God Himself has chosen for us to express our conscious need of Him and our humble dependence on Him.
John Stott
#54. 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.
John Stott
#55. 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.
John Stott
#56. 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.
John Stott
#57. Christians who neglect the Bible simply do not mature.
John Stott
#58. 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 ...
John Stott
#59. No man has ever appreciated the gospel until the law has first revealed him to himself. It is only against the inky blackness of the night sky that the stars begin to appear, and it is only against the dark background of sin and judgment that the gospel shines forth.
John Stott
#60. It is no exaggeration to say that without Scripture a Christian life is impossible.
John Stott
#61. Scripture is the royal scepter by which King Jesus rules his church
John Stott
#62. The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God's will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.
John Stott
#63. 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.
John Stott
#64. If God speaks to us about himself and his own glorious greatness, we respond by humbling ourselves before him in worship ... If He speaks to us about His commandments, we determine to obey them.
John Stott
#65. We live and die; Christ died and lived!
John Stott
#66. God condemned sin in Christ, so that holiness might appear in us.
John Stott
#67. It is a great comfort to know that our judge will be none other than our savior.
John Stott
#68. Apathy is the acceptance of the unacceptable.
John Stott
#69. 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.
John Stott
#70. The church is under orders. Evangelistic inactivity is disobedience.
John Stott
#71. Never use a gallon of words to express a spoonful of thought. Our unadorned word should be enough.
John Stott
#72. Faith is a reasoning trust, a trust which reckons thoughtfully and confidently upon the trustworthiness of God.
John Stott
#73. When the Christian loses himself, he finds himself, he discovers his true identity.
John Stott
#74. Baptism with water is the sign and seal of baptism with the Spirit, as much as it is of the forgiveness of sins. Water-baptism is the initiatory Christian rite, because Spirit-baptism is the initiatory Christian experience.
John Stott
#75. The symbol of the religion of Jesus is the cross, not the scales.
John Stott
#76. Moved by the perfection of His holy love, God in Christ substituted Himself for us sinners. That is the heart of the cross of Christ.
John Stott
#77. What we need is not more learning, not more eloquence, not more persuasion, not more organization, but more power from the Holy Spirit.
John Stott
#78. Truth without love is too hard; love without truth is too soft.
John Stott
#79. Greatness in the kingdom of God is measured in terms of obedience.
John Stott
#80. 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.
John Stott
#81. We have the means of evangelizing our country, but they are slumbering in the pews of our churches.
John Stott
#82. The concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.
John Stott
#83. 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.
John Stott
#84. All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God, because it is the adoration of His name.
John Stott
#85. 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.
John Stott
#86. Our Christian life began not with our decision to follow Christ but with God's call to us to do so.
John Stott
#87. Christian giving is to be marked by self-sacrifice and self-forgetfuln ess, not by self-congratula tion.
John Stott
#88. There is no biblical Christianity without the cross at its center.
John Stott
#89. 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.
John Stott
#90. God has clothed His thoughts in words, and there is no way to know Him except by knowing the Scriptures.
John Stott
#91. Indignation and compassion form a powerful combination. They are indispensable to vision, and therefore to leadership.
John Stott
#92. 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.
John Stott
#93. 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.
John Stott
#94. Because in no other person but the historic Jesus of Nazareth has God become man and lived a human life on earth, died to bear the penalty of our sins, and been raised from death and exalted to glory, there is no other Savior, for there is no other person who is qualified to save.
John Stott
#95. Christians believe that true worship is the highest and noblest activity of which man, by the grace of God, is capable.
John Stott
#96. We need to repent of the haughty way in which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under its judgment instead.
John Stott
#97. Lord Jesus, I pray that this day I may take up my cross and follow you.
John Stott
#98. But the Holy Spirit is not in a hurry. Character is the produce of a lifetime.
John Stott
#99. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.
John Stott
#100. At every step of our Christian development and in every sphere of our Christian discipleship, pride is the greatest enemy and humility our greatest friend.
John Stott
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
