Posted on 12/15/2017 6:46:57 AM PST by Gamecock
R. C. Sproul (1939–2017) went home to be with his Savior today at the age of 78. (Read Justin Taylor’s obituary.) The former pastor of St. Andrews Chapel and founder of Ligonier Ministries was also a prolific author who had a way with words.
Here are 40 of my favorite R. C. quotes. Thank you, God, for his life and legacy.
“There are only two ways of dying. We can die in faith or we can die in our sins.”
“We are secure, not because we hold tightly to Jesus, but because he holds tightly to us.”
“To know that God knows everything about me and yet loves me is indeed my ultimate consolation.”
”There is no greater state than to get up from your knees knowing that God has forgiven every sin you’ve ever committed.”
“If God is not sovereign, then God is not God.”
“When God says something, the argument is over.”
“A god who is all love, all grace, all mercy, no sovereignty, no justice, no holiness, and no wrath is an idol.”
“As soon as we think God owes us mercy, we’re not thinking about mercy any more.”
“When there’s something in the Word of God that I don’t like, the problem is not with the Word of God. It’s with me.”
“You are required to believe, to preach, and to teach what the Bible says is true, not what you want the Bible to say is true.”
“God does not always act with justice. Sometimes he acts with mercy. Mercy is not justice, but it also is not injustice. Injustice violates righteousness. Mercy manifests kindness and grace and does no violence to righteousness. We may see nonjustice in God, which is mercy, but we never see injustice in God.”
“People in awe never complain that church is boring.”
“I’ll retire when they pry my cold, dead fingers off of my Bible.”
“If ever a person had room to complain of injustice, it was Jesus. He was the only innocent man ever to be punished by God. If we stagger at the wrath of God, let us stagger at the cross. Here is where our astonishment should be focused. If we have cause for moral outrage, let it be directed at Golgotha.”
“No matter how much injustice I have suffered from the hands of other people, I have never suffered the slightest injustice from the hand of God.”
“God answered Job’s questions not with words but with himself.”
“The Christian life is a life of non-conformity.”
“Not only does Christ take our sins, our debts, and our demerits, but he also gives us his obedience, his assets, and his merits.”
“If there is no sanctification, it means that there never was any justification.”
“If we despise the justice of God, we are not Christians.”
“The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands.”
“We are not really surprised that God has redeemed us. Somewhere deep inside, in the secret chambers of our hearts we harbor the notion that God owes us his mercy. Heaven would not be quite the same if we were excluded from it. We know that we are sinners, but we are surely not as bad as we could be. There are enough redeeming features to our personalities that if God is really just he will include us in salvation. What amazes us is justice, not grace.”
“There are no draws with God, no split decisions. When we wrestle with the Almighty, we lose. He is the undefeated champion of the universe.”
“The justice of God is always and ever an expression of his holy character. . . . What God does is always consistent with who God is.”
“When we sin, we not only commit treason against God, but we also do violence to each other. Sin violates people. There is nothing abstract about it. By my sin I hurt human beings. I injure their person; I despoil their goods; I impair their reputation; I rob from them a precious quality of life; I crush their dreams and aspirations for happiness. When I dishonor God, I dishonor all people who bear his image. Is it any wonder, then, that God takes sin so seriously?”
“The problem we face is that the word holy is foreign to all languages. No dictionary is adequate to the task.”
“Death reminds us that we are creatures. Yet as fearsome as death is, it is nothing compared with meeting a holy God. When we encounter him, the totality of our creatureliness breaks upon us and shatters the myth that we have believed about ourselves, the myth that we are demigods, junior-grade deities who will try to live forever.”
“Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. Only once is a characteristic of God mentioned three times in succession. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy.”
“God has entrusted to us the ministry of the Word, not its results.”
”The cross was a glorious outworking of the grace of God, by which the Father commissioned the Son to make full satisfaction so that sinners might be saved with no sacrifice of God’s justice.”
“A Substitute has appeared in space and time, appointed by God himself, to bear the weight and the burden of our transgressions, to make expiation for our guilt, and to propitiate the wrath of God on our behalf. This is the gospel.”
“If I want the words of eternal life, there’s only one place I can go to get them—to the One who gave his life that we might live.”
“Nobody was ever saved by a profession of faith. You have to possess faith.”
“God doesn’t want me to play with religion. He doesn’t want me to dabble in church. He wants me—body and soul.”
“We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.”
“The grounds of your justification are the perfect works of Jesus Christ. We’re saved by works, but they’re not our own.”
“Without the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the gospel is not merely compromised; it’s lost altogether.”
“We fail in our duty to study God’s Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are lazy.”
“You can’t open your eyes in this universe without seeing a theater of divine revelation.”
“You can’t love Jesus and not love his Word.”
..Dr. Sproul was one of the giants of the faith—and one who can never be replaced...
Great quotes. Thanks for sharing them.
I listened to him daily during my commutes. His message was always powerful.
Good stuff there.
B T T T
Thanks for posting.
I don’t have the words to describe Dr. Sproul’s impact on me and my family. I am thankful for his life and ministry. Most famous pastors are an embarrassment, but there are a few who seem to be a universal gift to God’s people. Dr. Sproul was one of those men.
Here are links to two sermons I recommend for one and all:
1) “If God is sovereign, How can man be free?”
2) The Curse Motif of the Atonement
I think I'm going to reread "The Holiness of God" over the next couple of weeks.
Two excellent books. He wrote so many books that were important for me, different topics at different times— Chosen By God, Are We Together?, The Consequences of Ideas, The Last Days According to Jesus and on and on.
Great quotes. I miss him already but now he has ceased from his labors and is at the wedding feast. We can trust God that whenever a Elijah goes home an Elisha will take his place. I pray for those in his family who certainly will experience sadness for the loss.
You can grieve for me the week before I die, if I’m scared and hurting, but when I gasp that last fleeting breath and my immortal soul flees to heaven, I’m going to be jumping over fire hydrants down the golden streets…”
THOG is on my bookshelf, and my daughter and I (she’s a theology and Greek major) discuss it. Going to miss R.C. Sproul. I’m not a part of the Reformed movement, but I benefited from his teaching nonetheless.
A lot of folks are saying the same thing you did, that they are not Reformed, but he has touched them in some way.
Is there really any better testimony?
I have a friend and his sister, who both profess to be Christians but cannot believe there is an eternal hell of fire. Does anyone know of a good source, Book or online sermon that will bring them into the light of Who God actually is?
Just listened to his “back to basics” message on utoob. He mentions the message of both John the baptist and Jesus Christ: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. But he leaves out a BIG part of the gospel message. So integral to the gospel, is the promise of the Spirit, that John made specific declaration that the Lord would baptize with Holy Ghost.
But Mr Sproul makes no mention of the Lord’s command to be born of the water and of the Spirit; no mention that the Lord needed to go away so that the Comforter could come; no mention of the baptism of the Holy Ghost, that would be given, beginning at Jerusalem.
The usual mention of “what must I do to be saved” is alluded to, but the rest of that story ignored.
I know exactly what Mr Sproul preached: conversion, without conversion.
After 28 yrs of Calvinist upbringing, I know full well the preaching of “faith alone”, but have found the “faith” as selective: believing some of the words of the Lord Jesus (and his apostles), and ignoring words that are not convenient.
A sign of the gift of the Holy Ghost is not conviction of the heart, or those convicted (in Acts 2:37) would have already had the gift at that point.
A sign of the gift of the Holy Ghost is not joy, for the Samaritans (Acts 8) had Christ preached to them, saw miracles, had great joy, but didn’t receive the gift until later.
I don’t care how educated, how great at oration, how many books are authored; if a preacher, speaking of basics, doesn’t talk much about what the Lord commanded for conversion, then that is like entering in another way.
Such preachers do “touch and goes” in the book of Acts, mostly “touching the runway” only long enough to grab Acts 16:30,31, and then going full throttle to the next airport.
I liken them to a pilot (usually with passengers) supposedly knowing what he is doing, but when coming from an inland airport (without port authority), does a touch and go at an airport WITH authority, and proceeds on to another nation, landing without the required documentation.
Illegal immigration?
I think a good resource are John MacArthur’s many appearances on Larry King.
Here’s an example:
John MacArthur Explains True Gospel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib1GyZHPGaM
Isa 57:1-2 The righteous man perishes, and no one lays it to heart; devout men are taken away, while no one understands. For the righteous man is taken away from calamity; he enters into peace; they rest in their beds who walk in their uprightness.
The scriptures do not teach “eternal damnation”. It is a fable constructed by the early Roman and Latin fathers. Paul the Apostle never mentions it, nor do the other Apostles.
The word hell in the New Testament is used for three Greek words. Gehenna, Tartarus, and hades. Each of those words have their own important meaning, and are not properly translated by the word “hell”. We have been misled.
I suggest you read Alexander Thomson’s work on “How Eternity Slipped In”. You will be amazed at how we were lied to for so long.
God will reconcile all things to Himself through His Son and He is the “Savior of all men, specially them which believe”. Don’t be in the dark on this subject, be faithful to God to know His truth, not men’s.
“The scriptures do not teach “eternal damnation”.
While you are entitled to your opinion, I have to totally disagree with you.
Revelation 21:8 King James Version
8 But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.
Paul teaches that if you are not in Heaven then there’s only one other place.
1 Corinthians 6:9 King James Version
9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
ever and ever is how long to be in torment?
Revelation 14:11 King James Version
11 And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.
I know many that think as you because they want it to be so because of their many lost relatives and friends, but in reality there is and eternal reward and penalty.
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