R.C. Sproul, the influential theologian, author, and Bible preacher has written over fifty books on a wide variety of subjects relating to the Christian faith. It would be impossible to find the best quotes without hours of tedious labor, so here is a list of 60 of the best R.C. Sproul quotes that I found from his books, lectures, and from scouring about the interwebs.
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“Without God man has no reference point to define himself.”
“There is no such “mother” as Mother Nature. Nature itself is powerless to produce life of any kind. In itself, nature is barren. The power to produce life resides in the Author of nature—God. To substitute nature as the source of life is to confuse the creature with the Creator. All forms of nature worship are acts of idolatry that are detestable to God.”
“I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.”
“Humanism was not invented by man, but by a snake who suggested that the quest for autonomy might be a good idea.”
“Cynicism and skepticism are the crudest form of quasi-intellectualism… Let the cynic become cynical of his cynicism and the skeptic skeptical of his skepticism and join the battle.”
“And I say to the humanist with all cynicism, if I come from nothing, if I’m going to nothing, I am nothing, and why should I care who sits on the front of the bus or on the back of the bus? What do I care if its white germs or black germs that have rights in this world?”
“As the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, so the denial of God is the height of foolishness.”
“I’m afraid that in the United States of America today the prevailing doctrine of justification is not justification by faith alone. It is not even justification by good works or by a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in our culture today is justification by death. All one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die.”
“The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God.”
“God is serious about how we worship Him, and we must be serious about it, too.”
“The closer we are to God, the more the slightest sin will cause us deep sorrow.”
“If I hope in anything or anyone less than One who has power over suffering and, ultimately, death, I am doomed to final disappointment. Suffering will drive me to hopelessness. What character I have will disintegrate. It is the hope of Christ that makes it possible for us to persevere in times of tribulation and distress. We have an anchor for our souls that rests in the One who has gone before us and conquered.”
“It’s dangerous to assume that because a person is drawn to holiness in his study that he is thereby a holy man. There is irony here. I am sure that the reason I have a deep hunger to learn of the holiness of God is precisely because I am not holy. I am a profane man—a man who spends more time out of the temple than in it. But I have had just enough of a taste of the majesty of God to want more. I know what it means to be a forgiven man and what it means to be sent on a mission. My soul cries for more. My soul needs more.”
“If there is one maverick molecule in all the universe, then God is not sovereign. And if God is not sovereign, He is not God.”
“Most Christian’s salute the sovereignty of God but believe in the sovereignty of man.”
“The kingdom of God is not of the people, by the people, or for the people. It is a kingdom ruled by a King, and God does not rule by the consent of His subjects but by His sovereign authority. His reign extends over me whether I vote for Him or not.
“God’s grace is not infinite. God is infinite, and God is gracious. We experience the grace of an infinite God, but grace is not infinite. God sets limits to His patience and forbearance. He warns us over and over again that someday the ax will fall and His judgment will be poured out.”
“Prayer is not simply a soliloquy, a mere exercise in therapeutic self-analysis, or a religious recitation. Prayer is discourse with the personal God Himself.”
“The lordship of Jesus is not simply a hope of Christians that someday might be realized; it is a truth that has already taken place.”
“He is intangible and invisible. But His work is more powerful than the most ferocious wind. The Spirit brings order out of chaos and beauty out of ugliness. He can transform a sin-blistered man into a paragon of virtue. The Spirit changes people. The Author of life is also the Transformer of life.”
“The most violent expression of God’s wrath and justice is seen in the Cross. If ever a person had room to complain for 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.”
“The most obscene symbol in human history is the Cross; yet in its ugliness it remains the most eloquent testimony to human dignity.”
“The most brazen lie of all is the lie people tell themselves: “I have nothing to worry about from the wrath of God. My God is a God of love.” If that is your thought, your god is an idol.”
“God is never pleased with ignorant worship, with worship that is not grounded in the knowledge of God.”
“The Word of God can be in the mind without being in the heart; but it cannot be in the heart without first being in the mind.”
“The more faithful preachers are to the Word of God in their preaching, the more liable they are to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful people are to the Word of God the higher the message is that they will preach. The higher the message, the further they will be from obeying themselves.”
“If we are to be biblical, then, the issue is not whether we should have a doctrine of predestination or not, but what kind we should embrace.”
“I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed it—His Word. He alone has the power to change lives for eternity, and that power is focused on the Scriptures.”
“The more we are in the Word of God, the more the Spirit who inspired the Word and who illumines it for us will use the Word to confirm in our souls that we are truly His, that we are indeed among the children of God.”
“We need to be very careful to go to the pages of the Scripture to learn about God’s will and the leading of the Spirit, and not simply to listen to the popular teachings of the Christian subculture in which we live.”
“When I read the Bible, the Bible criticizes me, I don’t criticize the Bible.”
“If there is a secret, a carefully guarded secret, to human happiness, it is that one expressed in a seventeenth-century catechism that says, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” The secret to happiness is found in obedience to God. How can we be happy if we are not obedient? How can we be obedient if we do not know what it is we are to obey? Thus the top and the tail of it is that happiness cannot be fully discovered as long as we remain ignorant of God’s Word.”
“I cannot read God’s mind, however I can read God’s Word.”
“Isn’t is amazing that almost everyone has an opinion to offer about the Bible, and yet so few have studied it.”
“God just doesn’t throw a life preserver to a drowning person. He goes to the bottom of the sea, and pulls a corpse from the bottom of the sea, takes him up on the bank, breathes into him the breath of life and makes him alive.”
“Here, then, is the real problem of our negligence. 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.”
”When people tell me that they don’t believe in predestination I’m going to grab them by the throat and say, ‘Why not! The Bible TEACHES IT!’”
“It is fashionable in some academic circles to exercise scholarly criticism of the Bible. In so doing, scholars place themselves above the Bible and seek to correct it. If indeed the Bible is the Word of God, nothing could be more arrogant. It is God who corrects us; we don’t correct Him. We do not stand over God but under Him.”
“Whenever I read the psalms, I feel like I am eavesdropping on a saint having a personal conversation with God.”
“The worship to which we are called in our renewed state is far too important to be left to personal preferences, to whims, or to marketing strategies. It is the pleasing of God that is at the heart of worship. Therefore, our worship must be informed at every point by the Word of God as we seek God’s own instructions for worship that is pleasing to Him.”
“Mindless Christianity is no Christianity at all. You can’t love what you don’t know.”
“To be a Christian is to be a theologian—a student of God and his will. The church is where believers should be nurtured in the practice of correct theology. The contemporary disdain for theological content and emphasis on self-image and emotions were not shared by the apostolic church.”
“For the Christian, there can be joy in the midst of suffering, joy that transcends the pain of the moment. But we don’t really understand the grounds for this joy in the house of mirth. We discover it in the house of mourning. It is in weeping that we learn to contemplate the goodness of God. It is in mourning that we discover the peace of God that passes understanding.”
“Because of Christ, our suffering is not useless. It is part of the total plan of God, who has chosen to redeem the world through the pathway of suffering.”
“True faith always produces real conformity to Christ.”
“It distresses me somewhat to hear a person say, “I am a born-again Christian.” What’s wrong with such a statement? Well, what other kind of Christian is there? If rebirth is absolutely essential in order to get into the kingdom of God, as Jesus said it is, there cannot be such a thing as a non-born-again Christian. To say “born-again Christian” is like saying “Christian Christian.” It’s a redundancy, a kind of theological stuttering.”
“We do not segment our lives, giving some time to God, some to our business or schooling, while keeping parts to ourselves. The idea is to live all of our lives in the presence of God, under the authority of God, and for the honour and glory of God. That is what the Christian life is all about.”
“Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him… To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls.”
“If God is the Creator of the entire universe, then it must follow that He is the Lord of the whole universe. No part of the world is outside of His lordship. That means that no part of my life must be outside of His lordship.”
“Prayer does change things, all kinds of things. But the most important thing it changes is us. As we engage in this communion with God more deeply and come to know the One with whom we are speaking more intimately, that growing knowledge of God reveals to us all the more brilliantly who we are and our need to change in conformity to Him. Prayer changes us profoundly.”
“Sin is cosmic treason. Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign. It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself. Have you ever considered the deeper implications of the slightest sin, of the most minute peccadillo? What are we saying to our Creator when we disobey Him at the slightest point? We are saying no to the righteousness of God. We are saying, “God, Your law is not good. My judgement is better than Yours. Your authority does not apply to me. I am above and beyond Your jurisdiction. I have the right to do what I want to do, not what You command me to do.”
“There are only two ways that God’s justice can be satisfied with respect to your sin. Either you satisfy it or Christ satisfies it. You can satisfy it by being banished from God’s presence forever. Or you can accept the satisfaction that Jesus Christ has made.”
“For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition for membership.”
“If you don’t delight in the fact that your Father is holy, holy, holy, then you are spiritually dead. You may be in a church. You may go to a Christian school. But if there is no delight in your soul for the holiness of God, you don’t know God. You don’t love God. You’re out of touch with God. You’re asleep to his character.”
“As long as we bear the guilt of sin, we cannot protest that God is unjust in allowing us to suffer.”
“We want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanity’s rebellion from God.”
“I’ve often wondered where Jesus would apply His hastily made whip if He were to visit our culture. My guess is that it would not be money-changing tables in the temple that would feel His wrath, but the display racks in Christian bookstores.”
“The clearest sensation that a human being has when he experiences the holy is an overpowering and overwhelming sense of creatureliness. That is, when we are in the presence of God, we are humbled and become most aware of ourselves as creatures. This is the opposite of Satan’s original temptation, “You shall be as gods.”
“Our lives say much more about how we think than our books do. The theories we preach are not always the ones we actually believe. The theories we live are the ones we really believe.”
“The real crisis of worship today is not that the preaching is paltry or that it’s too drafty in church. It is that people have no sense of the presence of God, and if they have no sense of His presence, how can they be moved to express the deepest feelings of their souls to honor, revere, worship, and glorify God?”
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