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. CARSONGod’s love in John 3:16 is not amazing because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad.
More D. A. Carson Quotes
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The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross.
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To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.
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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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As long as young people are asking, ‘Can I get away with this?’ or ‘Can I get away with that?’ I wonder if they’re regenerate. If they’re asking, instead, ‘How can I grow in holiness?’ then I suspect they’ve begun to understand.
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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.
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God’s love in John 3:16 is not amazing because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad.
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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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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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If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist.
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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.
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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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Good praying is more easily caught than taught.
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We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.
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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.
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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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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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We are dealing with God’s thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.
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Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
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Study Bibles tend to circulate widely, so they play a disproportionate role in helping Christians and others understand holy Scripture.
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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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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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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 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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Sex is about timing. The world says: any time, any place. God says: my time, my place.
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God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never mitigates human responsibility.
D. A. CARSON