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. CARSONGod in his infinite wisdom chose to give us his Word in the 66 canonical books, with all of their variations in theme, emphasis, vocabulary, literary form, and distinctive contributions across time.
More D. A. Carson Quotes
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Any term can be distorted or domesticated or fly off the handle because of another alien philosophical structure that’s imposed on the text and so on. Inerrancy is no different from what we find in every other theologically loaded word.
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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.
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There’s a change in the heart; there’s a cleaning up, a change in orientation, and holiness becomes attractive, instead of something you have to put up with to figure out what you can get away with.
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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.
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Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It’s not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture.
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There is no long-range effective teaching of the Bible that is not accompanied by long hours of ongoing study of the Bible.
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When you are converted, you want to do what you didn’t want to do before, and you don’t want to do what you wanted to do before.
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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.
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My response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc.
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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.
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To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.
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That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble.
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It’s just that the group has accepted that document as authoritative for their group. And some documents are truthful and reliable but they are ignored, so they have no authority for that particular group.
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God has disclosed of himself in human words with such magnificent self accommodation to our limitations. Precisely so that we may be his holy people and reverence everything that he says, cherish it, value it, and thus live it out.
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The cliché, God hates the sin but love the sinner, is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone.
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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.
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What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence.
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Systematic theology will ask questions like “What are the attributes of God? What is sin? What does the cross achieve?” Biblical theology tends to ask questions such as “What is the theology of the prophecy of Isaiah? What do we learn from John’s Gospel?
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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.
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To worship God ‘in spirit and in truth’ is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows are being swept away (Hebrews 8:13).
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For the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne.
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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.
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We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.
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The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better.
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Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.
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Some people say What’s the use of the term if it has to be so fully documented and constrained and footnoted and all the rest.
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