D. A. Carson Quotes
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The New Testament writers I think conceive of their inspired Scripture writings as flushing out, bringing to articulation, expounding and so on the climactic revelation in the son, but this in self-conscious fulfillment of the promises and covenants that were already made to God's chosen people in Old Testament times.
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A wrong understanding is interested in precisionism. That is it tries to say that the Bible can't be telling the truth if it says that Jesus was such and such a distance from some place or other and in fact the distance is off by 15% or something like that. There are all kinds of grounded figures and so forth.
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What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence.
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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.
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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. 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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You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.
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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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We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray.
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One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most “evangelistic” movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.
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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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At the end of the day, in brief summary: inerrancy is interested in the truthfulness of Scripture and it is a powerful way forcing people to think about that reliability that is God-given.
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True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us
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...sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances, rather than change our circumstances.
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For example, the Bible does say this is a proposition, "There is no God." But of course the context of Psalm 14:1 enriches it a bit: "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God." So there are contextual constraints and when you finish putting in all the contextual constraints and sophisticated discussions of what inerrancy is and isn't.
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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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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.
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God has disclosed of himself in human words with such magnificent self accommodation to our limitations. Precisely so that we may be his holy people and reverence everything that he says, cherish it, value it, and thus live it out.
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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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Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It's not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture.
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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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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.
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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, 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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Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. This vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns
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In every generation there are voices that question the authority of Scripture. So in one sense this is merely part of the continuing stream. But there's a sense in which the questions that are raised against Scripture vary a wee bit from generation to generation.