John Stott
We should not ask, ‘What is wrong with the world?’ for that diagnosis has already been given. Rather we should ask, “What has happened to salt and light?Collection: Light
A Christian should resemble a fruit tree with real fruit, not a Christmas tree with decorations tied onCollection: Christian
God intends us to penetrate the world. Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad. And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves? One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad. It cannot do anything else. The real question to ask is: Where is the salt?Collection: Christian
We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.Collection: Spiritual
Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.Collection: Christian Inspirational
The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God's will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.Collection: Prayer
For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God [Gen. 3:1-7], while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man [2 Cor. 5:21]. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.Collection: Bible
Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and checkered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture .Collection: Christian
Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.Collection: Christian
Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from His fruit, and no effective witness without His power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.Collection: Christian
God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us.Collection: Doe
Christians who neglect the Bible simply do not mature.Collection: Bible
The authority by which the Christian leader leads is not power but love, not force but example, not coercion but reasoned persuasion. Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.Collection: Christian
Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fiber of Christianity. Why is it that those who have no biblical convictions or theology to govern and direct their actions are tolerated and the standard or truth of God's Word rightly divided and applied is dismissed as extreme opinion or legalism?Collection: Spiritual
The Spirit of God leads the people of God to submit to the Word of God.Collection: People
Greatness in the kingdom of God is measured in terms of obedience.Collection: Greatness
We need to repent of the haughty way in which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under its judgments instead. If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God's, then indeed he will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.Collection: Echoes
Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, 'I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.' Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross.Collection: Cutting
Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmonyCollection: Children
It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.Collection: Feet
An unchurched christian is a grotesque anomaly. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God's new community.Collection: Christian
Faith, Hope & Love. Faith is directed towards God, love towards others (both within the Christian fellowship and beyond it) and hope towards the future, in particular, the glorious coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Similarly, faith rests of the past; love works in the present; hope looks to the future. Every Christian without exception is a believer, a lover and a hoper. Faith, hope and love are three sure evidences of regeneration by the Holy Spirit.Collection: Christian
Prayer is the very way God Himself has chosen for us to express our conscious need of Him and our humble dependence on Him.Collection: Prayer
The chief reason people do not know God is not because He hides from them but because they hide from Him.Collection: People
Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it.Collection: Christian
Mission arises from the heart of God Himself and is communicated from His heart to ours. Mission is the global outreach of the global people of a global God.Collection: Heart
So, because in no other person but Jesus of Nazareth did God first become human (in his birth), then bear our sins (in his death), then conquer death (in his resurrection) and then enter his people (by his Spirit), he is uniquely able to save sinners. Nobody else has his qualifications.Collection: Jesus
I have never been able to conjure up (as some great Evangelical missionaries have) the appalling vision of the millions who are not only perishing but will inevitably perish. On the other hand... I am not and cannot be a universalist. Between these extremes I cherish and hope the majority of the human race will be be saved. And I have a solid biblical basis for this belief.Collection: Biblical
The meaning of atonement is not to be found in our penitence evoked by the sight of Calvary, but rather in what God did when in Christ on the cross He took our place and bore our sin.Collection: Sight
The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.Collection: Strong
Indignation and compassion form a powerful combination. They are indispensable to vision, and therefore to leadership.Collection: Powerful
A deaf church is a dead church: that is an unalterable principle.Collection: Church
If God speaks to us about himself and his own glorious greatness, we respond by humbling ourselves before him in worship... If He speaks to us about His commandments, we determine to obey them.Collection: Greatness
Theology is a serious quest for the true knowledge of God, undertaken in response to His self-revelation, illumined by Christian tradition, manifesting a rational inner coherence, issuing in ethical conduct, resonating with the contemporary world and concerned for the greater glory of God.Collection: Christian
So close was Christ's connection with God that he equated a man's attitude to himself with the man's attitude to God.Collection: Christian
Baptism with water is the sign and seal of baptism with the Spirit, as much as it is of the forgiveness of sins. Water-baptism is the initiatory Christian rite, because Spirit-baptism is the initiatory Christian experience.Collection: Christian
We are to be strong in faith, and soft in love.Collection: Strong
The question is not so much what the hand is doing (passing over some cash or a check) but what the heart is thinking while the hand is doing it.Collection: Heart
Biblical righteousness is more than a private and personal affair; it includes social righteousness as well....Thus Christians are committed to hunger for righteousness in the whole human community as something pleasing to a righteous God.Collection: Christian
We need to repent of the haughty way in which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under its judgment instead.Collection: Bible
There is evidence for the deity of Jesus -- good, strong, historical , cumulative evidence; evidence to which an honest person can subscribe without committing intellectual suicide.Collection: Suicide
No theology is genuinely Christian which does not arise from and focus on the cross.Collection: Christian
We cannot be content with an evangelism which does not lead to the drawing of converts into the church, nor with a church order whose principle of cohesion is a superficial social camaraderie instead of a spiritual fellowship with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.Collection: Spiritual
If we love our neighbor we shall without doubt tell him the good news of Jesus. But equally if we truly love our neighbor we shall not stop there.Collection: Jesus
A gift is acceptable according to what the giver has, not according to what he has not.Collection: Generosity
God intends... our care of Creation to reflect our love for the Creator.Collection: Our Love
God condemned sin in Christ, so that holiness might appear in us.Collection: Holiness
We can all be stimulated to greater generosity by the known generosity of others.Collection: Generosity
The hallmark of an authentic evangelicalism is not the uncritical repetition of old traditions but the willingness to submit every tradition, however ancient, to fresh biblical scrutiny and, if necessary, reform.Collection: Inspirational
The gospel creates the church, which spreads the gospel, which creates more churches, which in turn spread the gospel further ad infinitum.Collection: Church