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.
D. A. CARSONMy response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc.
More D. A. Carson Quotes
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God’s wrath is not an implacable, blind rage. However emotional it may be, it is an entirely reasonable and willed response to offenses against his holiness. But his love . . . wells up amidst his perfections and is not generated by the loveliness of the loved.
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We are told that God hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and on the sinner (John 3:36).
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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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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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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.”
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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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We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.
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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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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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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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Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake.
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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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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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Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced.
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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.
D. A. CARSON






