The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God’s approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.
D. A. CARSONSystematic 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?
More D. A. Carson Quotes
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We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.
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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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I suspect that relatively few people will sit down and read 1250 pages [ of The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures.] all the way through from cover to cover.
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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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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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A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen.
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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.
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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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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.
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Justice is not always done in this world; we see that everyday. But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying, “This isn’t fair.”
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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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Good praying is more easily caught than taught.
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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 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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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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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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There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
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Jesus is hungry but feeds others; He grows weary but offers others rest; He is the King Messiah but pays tribute; He is called the devil but casts out demons; He dies the death of a sinner but comes to save His people from their sins;
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So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it’s the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn’t interested in any of those kinds of things.
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If you want to see what judgment looks like, go to the cross. If you want to see what love looks like, go to the cross.
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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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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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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.
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Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship.
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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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