Top 100 Stott Quotes
#1. Anything John Stott says is worth listening to. Anything he writes is worth reading. Basic Christianity is not only a classic must-read for every believer; it is truly a blessing preserved on the written page for the enrichment of this generation and those to come.
Anne Graham Lotz
#2. John Stott concludes, "It seems to have been Paul's deliberate policy to move purposefully from one strategic city-centre to the next."5
Timothy J. Keller
#3. Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.
John R.W. Stott
#4. Jesus evidently thought that human beings still retained a residue of their former glory.
John R.W. Stott
#5. And self-sacrifice is what the Bible means by 'love.' While sin is possessive, love is expansive. Sin's characteristic is the desire to get; love's characteristic is the desire to give.
John R.W. Stott
#6. Every powerful movement has had its philosophy which has gripped the mind, fired the imagination and captured the devotion of its adherents.
John Stott
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. We state and commend the faith only in so far as we go out and put ourselves inside the doubts of the doubters, the questions of the questioners and the loneliness of those who have lost their way.
John R.W. Stott
#11. Good works are indispensable to salvation - not as its ground or means, however, but as its consequence and evidence.
John Stott
#12. The radical biblical perspective is to see death not as the termination of life but as the gateway to life.
John R.W. Stott
#13. The forgiveness of God is a gift to be received, not a reward to be merited.
John R.W. Stott
#14. I always leave room for serendipity and chance.
Ken Stott
#15. I am very aware of how warmly Scotland is regarded around the world, and a vote for self-determination would raise our international profile even further, with lots of benefits for Scottish arts and culture.
Ken Stott
#16. 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
#17. Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.
John R.W. Stott
#18. 'Death Of A Salesman' is a great acting job.
Ken Stott
#19. There is evidence for the deity of Jesus
good, strong,
historical , cumulative evidence; evidence to which an honest
person can subscribe without committing intellectual suicide.
John R.W. Stott
#20. A guilty conscience is a great blessing, but only if it drives us to come home.
John R.W. Stott
#21. The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice-and so the pain-of the cross.
John Stott
#22. Pride is more than the first of the seven deadly sins; it is itself the essence of all sin.
John Stott
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I've definitely done my share of tripping over monitors, etc. but nothing could compare to the time when I totally forgot the beginning of a song that I was starting on stage.
Amanda Stott
#27. I've got a feeling that with the best coppers - and in fact the best people in any field of work - what sets them apart is a maverick quality. People who are not afraid to bend the rules in order to achieve the universally desired end.
Ken Stott
#28. For if there is 'false guilt' (feeling bad about evil we have not done), there is also 'false innocence' (feeling good about the evil we have done). If false contrition is unhealthy (an ungrounded weeping over guilt), so is false assurance (an ungrounded rejoicing over forgiveness).
John R.W. Stott
#29. There is no value in the reading of Scripture for its own sake, but only if it effectively introduces us to Jesus Christ.
John R.W. Stott
#30. Self-forgetfulness is unattainable as a goal, except as the byproduct of preoccupation with Another's presence, and with his message, his power, and his glory.
John R.W. Stott
#31. 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
#32. There's always been a women's movement this century!
Mary Stott
#33. The modern world detests authority but worships relevance. Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance, and that the secret of both is Jesus Christ
John Stott
#34. Persecution is simply the clash between two irreconcilable value-systems.
John Stott
#35. 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
#36. But when the teaching of the Bible is plain, then continuing to maintain an open mind is a sign not of maturity, but of immaturity.
John R.W. Stott
#37. Many (Christians) have zeal without knowledge, enthusiasm without enlightenment. In more modern jargon, they are keen but clueless.
John Stott
#38. Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and chequered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture.
John R.W. Stott
#39. Simplicity is the first cousin of contentment.
John Stott
#40. No one will die if they don't know how old I am.
Ken Stott
#41. In every area, we seem to have thrown everything away and embraced reality television. It's nauseating, programme after programme.
Ken Stott
#42. For whenever we turn away from Christ, we 'are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace' (Heb. 6:6).
John R.W. Stott
#43. 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
#44. If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, India would be at your feet tomorrow.
John R.W. Stott
#45. The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of its worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified.
John Stott
#46. We should travel light and live simply. Our enemy is not possessions but excess.
John Stott
#47. For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.
Ken Stott
#48. 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
#49. P. T. Forsyth's book Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind. These are its opening words: 'It is, perhaps, an overbold beginning, but I will venture to say that with its preaching Christianity stands or falls.
John R.W. Stott
#50. 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
#51. A deaf church is a dead church: that is an unalterable principle.
John Stott
#52. What God said to Abraham was not 'Obey this law and I will bless you', but 'I will bless you; believe my promise'.
John R.W. Stott
#53. 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
#54. God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us.
John Stott
#55. Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.
John Stott
#56. Our responsibility before God is an inalienable aspect of our human dignity. Its final expression will be on the day of judgment. Nobody will be sentenced without trial.
John R.W. Stott
#57. God continues to speak through what He has spoken.
John Stott
#58. There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God.
John Stott
#59. The Scottish are not shy when it comes to expressing themselves.
Ken Stott
#60. So close was Christ's connection with God that he equated a man's attitude to himself with the man's attitude to God.
John Stott
#61. We have rejected the position of dependence which our createdness inevitably involves, and made a bid for independence. Worse still, we have dared to proclaim our self-dependence, our autonomy, which is to claim the position occupied by God alone.
John R.W. Stott
#62. 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
#63. Producers and directors think they have the power, but what they think of as the weakest link, the actor, is all-powerful.
Ken Stott
#64. I knew this in my mother heart-of-hearts: This child was meant to come.
Lori Stott
#65. 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
#66. I am wholeheartedly in favour of an independent Scotland.
Ken Stott
#67. 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
#68. Do not be content with a static Christian life. Determine rather to grow in faith and love, in knowledge and holiness.
John Stott
#69. The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought.
John Stott
#70. Whenever I see pointless use of special effects, I reach for something else.
Ken Stott
#71. I didn't like crab. Not at all. My stepmother had tricked my into eating a crab sandwich once in a cafe in Cromer, told me it was tuna. I'd never forgiven her.
Rebecca Stott
#72. 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
#73. No acting, no production, could take the place of that moment when you come out in the dark on to the stage and the drummer plays four beats on the hi-hat and then lights and music. It just takes your breath away. No words can do what music can.
Ken Stott
#74. Self-denial is not denying to ourselves luxuries such as chocolates, cakes, cigarettes and cocktails (although it might include this); it is actually denying or disowning ourselves, renouncing our supposed right to go our own way.
John R.W. Stott
#75. We are to be strong in faith, and soft in love.
John Stott
#76. A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself has ceased to follow him.
John R.W. Stott
#77. 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
#78. Jesus Christ, we believe, is the fulfilment of every truly human aspiration. To find him is to find ourselves.
John R.W. Stott
#79. 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
#80. My first major role was in a play called 'Through the Leaves.'
Ken Stott
#81. The Christian's chief occupational hazards are depression and discouragement.
John Stott
#82. A gift is acceptable according to what the giver has, not according to what he has not.
John Stott
#83. Instead of inflicting upon us the judgment we deserved, God in Christ endured it in our place.
John Stott
#84. Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony
John Stott
#85. You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.' This situation is tragic beyond words. We are missing the destiny for which God made us.
John R.W. Stott
#86. The chief reason people do not know God is not because He hides from them but because they hide from Him.
John Stott
#87. The overriding reason why we should take other people's cultures seriously is because God has taken ours seriously.
John R.W. Stott
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. We need to emphasize that what the Spirit speaks he speaks through what has already been spoken, and that what the Spirit does he does through what has already been done.
John R.W. Stott
#91. 110. When I enter the pulpit with the Bible in my hands and in my heart, my blood begins to flow and my eyes to sparkle for the sheer glory of having God's Word to expound.
John R.W. Stott
#92. It's only when you've pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask.
Rebecca Stott
#93. 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
#94. [E]very heresy is due to an overemphasis upon some truth, without allowing other truths to qualify and balance it.
John R.W. Stott
#95. We must trust in him as our Saviour and submit to him as our Lord; and then go on to take our place as loyal members of the church and responsible citizens in the community.
John R.W. Stott
#96. The power to save lies in the one who is gazed upon, not the one who does the looking.
John R.W. Stott
#97. There are many actors who'll make their living in other areas, and they'll say they don't like theatre. What they're saying is that they're afraid of theatre because they know it will separate those who can from those who can't.
Ken Stott
#98. Inspector Rebus is a great character, so when the opportunity came up to revive the role for 'BBC Children in Need,' and really have a bit of fun with it, I was happy to take part.
Ken Stott
#99. To be disrespectful of tradition and of historical theology is to be disrespectful of the Holy Spirit who has been actively enlightening the church in every century.
John R.W. Stott
#100. 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
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