Top 100 Sinclair B. Ferguson Quotes
#1. There is a difference between going to a service "for the worship" and going to a service "to worship the Lord." The distinction appears to be a minor one, but it may imply the difference between the worship of God and the worship of music!
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#2. How do we bring glory to God? The Bible's short answer is: by growing more and more like Jesus Christ.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#4. Regeneration, however it is described, is a divine activity in us, in which we are not the actors but the recipients.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#5. Marriage, and the process of coming to it, is not heaven! It is the bonding together of two needy sinners in order to make a partnership which is substantially greater than either of them alone.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#6. Jesus has a special, compassionate concern for those who are broken and needy.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#7. An inability to encourage someone else is usually rooted in an absorption
with self that is blind to the needs or gifts of others, or a pride that cannot bring itself to praise God's grace in them.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#8. As the early church fathers delighted in saying, Christ took what was ours so that we might receive what was His.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#9. Repentance, turning from sin, and degrees of conviction of sin do not constitute the grounds on which Christ is offered to us. They may constitute ways in which the Spirit works as the gospel makes its impact on us. But they never form the warrant for repentance and faith.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#10. Our first priority in ministry must be love. Love for His Word, love for His people, and love for His appearing.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#11. The conviction that Christian doctrine matters for Christian living is one of the most important growth points of the Christian life.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#12. Thus the motivation, energy and drive for holiness are all found in the reality and power of God's grace in Christ. And so if I am to make any progress in sanctification, the place where I must always begin is the gospel of the mercy of God to me in Christ Jesus.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#15. I began to read for myself and realised that here was somebody who could teach me profound biblical theology, get inside my heart with his spiritual analysis, and help me to become a minister of the gospel, which is what I wanted to be.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#16. The fallacy here? The subtle movement from seeing forsaking sin as the fruit of grace that is rooted in election, to making the forsaking of sin the necessary precursor for experiencing that grace. Repentance, which is the fruit of grace, thus becomes a qualification for grace. This
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#17. So long as Jesus Christ is there, in heaven before God for us, our salvation will last.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#18. Humility is not simply feeling small and useless - like an inferiority complex. It is sensing how great and glorious God is, and seeing myself in that light.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#19. God has chosen us. Our status is not a matter of our worthiness, but of His love.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#20. These considerations give us some clues as to why legalism and antinomianism are, in fact, nonidentical twins that emerge from the same womb. Eve
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#21. We best defend the Lord's glory by speaking first TO Him about unbelieving men rather than speaking first ABOUT Him to unbelieving men.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#22. The real test that I believe that God is love is that tragedies don't separate me from the conviction that God is love.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#23. The foundation of worship in the heart is not emotional ... it is theological.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#24. Do I learn through dark providences, or simply seem relieved when they are over?
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#25. Without the spirit of the Lord Jesus, we will look upon 'the least of these' simply as the least.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#26. Christianity is Christ because there isn't anything else. There is no atonement that somehow can be detached from who the Lord Jesus is. There is no grace that can be attached to you transferred from Him. All there is, is Christ and your soul.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#27. Evil deeds are the fruit of an evil heart. They are not an aberration from our true self but a revelation of it.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#28. The jewels of spiritual service are always quarried in the depths of spiritual experience. Never is this more true than in revival. Bend the church and save the people.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#29. Inerrancy matters because it honors the Spirit, who wants to honor the Son, who wants to honor the Father.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#30. Don't tell me that you have a Reformed Church in the tradition of Calvin until you have the preaching of the Word every day of the week, devote Wednesday's to prayer and have the church gather together for prayer.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#31. When we see salvation whole, its every single part is found in Christ, And so we must beware lest we derive the smallest drop from somewhere else.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#32. Pharisees lived "according to the strictest party of . . . religion."3 The name itself is probably derived from the root "to separate." Pharisaism was essentially a conservative "holiness movement." So
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#33. Then all my servile works were done A righteousness to raise; Now, freely chosen in the Son, I freely choose his ways.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#35. God is God; you are but one of His creatures. Your only joy is to be found in obeying Him, your true fulfillment is to be found in worshiping Him, your only wisdom is to be found in trusting and knowing Him.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#36. You must first have Christ himself, before you can partake of those benefits by him.19
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#37. God's promises are not fortune cookies. We do not use them in order to get a spiritual "fix" for the day.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#38. What is a godly pastor, after all, but one who is like God, with a heart of grace; someone who sees God bringing prodigals home and runs to embrace them, weeps for joy that they have been brought home, and kisses them - asking no questions - no qualifications or conditions required?
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#40. The offer of the gospel is to be made not to the righteous or even the repentant, but to all. There are no conditions that need to be met in order for the gospel offer to be made.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#43. It's the centrality of the Word and not the person who preaches it that's important.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#45. Christian contentment, therefore, is the direct fruit of having no higher ambition than to belong to the Lord and to be totally at His disposal in the place He appoints, at the time He chooses, with the provision He is pleased to make.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#46. The fear of the Lord tends to take away all other fears ... This is the secret of Christian courage and boldness.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#47. The Father did not require the death of Christ to persuade Him to love us. Christ died because the Father loves us.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#49. No short-cut that tries to bypass the patient unfolding of the true character of God, and our relationship to him as his children, can ever succeed in providing long-term spiritual therapy.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#51. You do not become a master musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true of the life of prayer.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#52. Jesus undid everything that Adam did, and did everything Adam failed to do.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#55. Thankfulness grows best in the seed-bed of conviction, just as some plants must be placed in the soil in the winter if they are to flower in the summer.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#56. Probably no theologian in English language has ever rivaled Owen stressing the absolute centrality of Christ's penal substitution and therefore his as Priest ... For that reason alone The Priesthood of Christ is worth all the time it takes to read it with humility, care, and reflection.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#57. God made everything else but man "after its kind"' - that is, according to the purpose and destiny he envisaged for it. But he made man in His own image. Man is patterned on God! He was made to represent God - in created, human form.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#58. There is nothing more important to learn about Christian growth than this: Growing in grace means becoming like Christ.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#59. True Christian liberty, unlike the various "freedom" or "liberation" movements of the secular world, is not a matter of demanding the "rights" we have.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#60. The only thing of my very own which I contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#62. Jesus Christ is able to set us free because He has dealt with the sin that enslaves us.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#63. you cannot destroy love for the world merely by showing its emptiness. The world-centered love of our hearts can be expelled only by a new love and affection-for God and from God. The love of the world and the love of the Father cannot coexist in the same heart
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#64. If you are justified, you can no more be unjustified than Christ can be pulled down from heaven.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#65. There is a difference between a well-instructed congregation and a well-nourished one.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#66. If you desire anything less for yourself than absolute obedience to God, a life of total devotion to the Lord, a life of absolute sin-less-ness - if you desire anything less, you are fighting against God's desire for you.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#67. The goal of theology is the worship of God. The posture of theology is on one's knees. The mode of theology is repentance.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#68. Our thinking about who we are as Christians should not begin with what we can discover about ourselves by self-analysis. Rather, it begins with what God says about those who trust in Christ.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#70. If the benefits of Christ's work (justification, reconciliation, adoption, and so on) are abstracted from Christ himself, and the proclamation of the gospel is made in terms of what it offers rather than in terms of Christ himself, the question naturally arises: To whom can I offer these benefits?
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#71. But it is serpentine logic, for it simply compounds the old legal spirit. It is the natural instinct of the once-antinomian prodigal who, when awakened, thinks in terms of working his way back into the favor of his father.38
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#72. The holiness of God teaches us that there is only one way to deal with sin- radically, seriously, painfully, constantly. If you do not so live, you do not live in the presence of the Holy One of Israel.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#73. The foundation of our love for the Lord lies in the recognition of His holiness, our sinfulness, and His grace.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#74. God possesses personal being in a unified, uncreated, eternal, tri-personal manner.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#75. Until we acknowledge our sin and guilt, we will never come to discover that it can be forgiven.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#76. The weakest faith gets the same strong Christ as does the strongest faith.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#77. This is the key to the enjoyment of assurance precisely because assurance is our assurance that he is a great Savior and that he is ours.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#78. By way of contrast he wanted to stress that the gospel's center is found in Jesus Christ himself, who has been crucified for sin and raised for justification, with the inbuilt implication that Christ himself thus defined and described should be proclaimed as able to save all who come to him.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#79. My security as a Christian does not reside in the strength of my faith but in the indestructibili ty of my Savior.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#80. Anyone who comes to grips with the issues raised in The Marrow of Modern Divinity will almost certainly grow by leaps and bounds in understanding three things: the grace of God, the Christian life, and the very nature of the gospel itself.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#81. Those who are most conscious of forgiveness are invariably those who have been most acutely convicted of their sin.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#82. Karl Barth once wittily remarked, One can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#83. Thinking that I deserve heaven is a sure sign I have no understanding of the gospel.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#84. Repentance is a characteristic of the whole life, not the action of a single moment.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#85. ...we are always entertaining the delusion that we will go on forever in this world. The result is that the very things which ought to be of assistance to us in our pilgrimage through life, become chains which bind us.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#86. What the prophets of God did spiritually, the Prophet of God did quite literally and physically.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#87. pastors need themselves to have been mastered by the unconditional grace of God. From them the vestiges of a self-defensive pharisaism and conditionalism need to be torn. Like the Savior they need to handle bruised reeds without breaking them and dimly burning wicks without quenching them.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#88. Worship is not something we "work up," it is something that "comes down" to us, from the character of God.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#89. True faith takes its character and quality from its object. Its strength therefore depends on the character of Christ. Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#90. God protects us from Satan even at times when we are not aware of His protection. But how can we develop Jesus-like discernment? By Spirit-aided digestion of the solid food of God's wisdom.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#91. Most Christians have more Bibles than they know what to do with, but have little understanding of what is in them.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#92. We discover the will of God by a sensitive application of Scripture to our own lives.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#93. Christians have a new identity. We are no longer 'in Adam' but 'in Christ'; no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit ...
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#94. We are far too good at analyzing what is wrong with the culture and far too myopic at analyzing what is wrong in the church.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#95. Twentieth-century man needs to be reminded at times that work is not the result of the Fall. Man was made to work, because the God who made him was a 'working God.' Man was made to be creative, with his mind and his hands. Work is part of the dignity of his existence.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#96. The notion that we are children of God, his own sons and daughters, lies at the heart of all Christian theology, and is the mainspring of all Christian living.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#97. There had been occasions when David could have seized position and power by means that would have compromised his commitment to the Lord.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#98. The Son of God came to dwell in human flesh for us in order that He might come to dwell in us by His Spirit.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#99. The problem is not in the clarity of the revelation. The problem is in the darkness of the human mind.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#100. Spiritual growth depends on two things: first a willingness to live according to the Word of God; second, a willingness to take whatever consequences emerge as a result.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
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