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Make a mistake in the interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays, falsely scan a piece of Spenserian verse, and there is unlikely to be an entailment of eternal consequence; but we cannot lightly accept a similar laxity in the interpretation of Scripture.

D. A. Carson

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.
D. A. CARSON

Heart Long People
What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort.
D. A. CARSON

Christian Jesus Jobs
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.
D. A. CARSON

Accept Group Particular Truthful
A little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.
D. A. CARSON

Courage God Little Love Sympathy
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

Father Jesus Unqualified
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

Evil Gentleman Play
How can that be? This is quite a contrast with Islam, for example, which holds that the Koran has been dictated in Arabic by God and as a result Mohammed is nothing more than the one who memorizes the word so as to pass it on. There is nothing of human contribution.
D. A. CARSON

Dicatted Example God Memorize Person
There may be some, but not everybody. But there are many, many, many different Christian, theological, pastoral, specialisms that are covered by one section or another of the book and this will become, therefore, a resource volume for many people.
D. A. CARSON

Become Book Christian Different Everybody Section
To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.
D. A. CARSON

Father God Knowing Loving Resolution
Effectiveness in teaching the Bible is purchased at the price of much study, some of it lonely, all of it tiring.
D. A. CARSON

Effectiveness Lonely Teaching
Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship.
D. A. CARSON

Christian Inspired Worship
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

Christian Jesus Winning
A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen.
D. A. CARSON

Disaster Persons Waiting
Often a Study Bible will also include some brief articles, photographs of geographical and archaeological sites, fairly extensive maps, and charts that summarize a lot of information.
D. A. CARSON

Archeological Information Often Sunday
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

Fountain Interesting Stories
It’s not as if the New Testament writers came along and said, “The culmination of Old Testament books is more books, New Testament books.”
D. A. CARSON

Book Father Son
Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced.
D. A. CARSON

Christ Christian Want
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

Common People Reader Study
Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.
D. A. CARSON

Blessing Prayer Technique
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.
D. A. CARSON

Different Domesticated Form Philosophical
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

God Knows Suffering Way
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

Sin Understanding Weak
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.
D. A. CARSON

Hate Liars Wrath
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

Covenant Moving Wrath
God 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.
D. A. CARSON

Contribution Distinctive God Vocabulary
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

Believe Evidence Moral Want
The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross.
D. A. CARSON

Horror Sin Treasure

Make a mistake in the interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays, falsely scan a piece of Spenserian verse, and there is unlikely to be an entailment of eternal consequence; but we cannot lightly accept a similar laxity in the interpretation of Scripture.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Make a mistake in the interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays, falsely scan a piece of Spenserian verse, and there is unlikely to be an entailment of eternal consequence; but we cannot lightly accept a similar laxity in the interpretation of Scripture.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More D. A. Carson Quotes