24 Sinclair B. Ferguson Quotes

As in all warfare, the two essential elements in victory are knowing your enemy and knowing your resources.

Spiritual growth depends on two things: first a willingness to live according to the Word of God; second, a willingness to take whatever consequences emerge as a result.

No one enjoys being cross-examined, or accused of having something wrong in their lives. But as we grow as Christians we come to the painful recognition that we have an almost unlimited capacity for self-deception. We slowly learn that we need to be stopped in our tracks by God. He uses Scripture to do this... We cannot reach our destination if we are travelling in the wrong direction.

We are adopted into God's family through the resurrection of Christ from the dead in which he paid all our obligations to sin, the law, and the devil, in whose family we once lived. Our old status lies in his tomb. A new status is ours through his resurrection.

It is God who gives us the spirit of worship (Psalm 133:3), and it is what we know of God that produces this spirit of worship. We might say that worship is simply theology, doctrine, what we think about God, going into top gear! Instead of merely thinking about Him, we tell Him, in prayer and praise and song, how great and glorious we believe Him to be!

Where God is at the center of things, worship inevitably follows. Where there is no spirit of worship, there God has been dethroned and displaced.

You do not become a master musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true of the life of prayer.

God's love is the most awesome thing about Him. It is not His justice, nor His majesty, nor even His blazing holiness, but the fact that He has made and keeps a covenant of personal commitment and love to His people.

There is no mere doctrine of "the security" of the believer, as though God's keeping of us took place irrespective of the lives we live. Indeed there is no such thing in the New Testament as a believer whose perseverance is so guaranteed that he can afford to ignore the warning notes which are sounded so frequently.

There is a difference between going to a service "for the worship" and going to a service "to worship the Lord." The distinction appears to be a minor one, but it may imply the difference between the worship of God and the worship of music!

Appearances can be deceptive. The fact that we cannot see what God is doing does not mean that He is doing nothing. The Lord has His own timetable. It is we who must learn to adjust to it, not vice versa. When God's time comes nothing will stand in His way. We can therefore wait for Him with this happy confidence: "As for God, His way is perfect" (2 Samuel 22:31).

Too often we fail to appreciate that (the) apprehension of God is not only the test of our worship, but also the test of our spiritual growth. A Christian's real development in spiritual life will always be revealed by how he or she thinks about God - how much he thinks about Him, and how highly he thinks about Him.

God's holiness means He is separate from sin. But holiness in God also means wholeness. God's holiness is His "God-ness." It is His being God in all that it means for Him to be God. To meet God in His holiness, therefore, is to be altogether overwhelmed by the discovery that He is God, and not man.

There is a center to the Bible and its message of grace. It is found in Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected. Grace must therefore be preached in a way that is centered and focused on Jesus Christ Himself, never offering the benefits of the gospel without the Benefactor Himself.

How you view God determines the quality and style of your Christian experience. Many Christians spend much of their lives paralyzed because, although they have trusted Christ as Savior, they have never really seen what His sacrifice teaches us about the character of God. He gave His Son; He sent His Son; He "handed over" His Son because He loves us.

Only by seeing our sin do we come to see the need for and wonder of grace. But exposing sin is not the same thing as unveiling and applying grace. We must be familiar with and exponents of its multifaceted power, and know how to apply it to a variety of spiritual conditions. Truth to tell, exposing sin is easier than applying grace; for, alas, we are more intimate with the former than we sometimes are with the latter. Therein lies our weakness.

You cannot open the pages of the New Testament without realizing that one of the things that makes it so 'new', in every way, is that here men and women call God 'Father'. This conviction, that we can speak to the Maker of the universe in such intimate terms, lies at the heart of the Christian faith. Through Christ, says Paul, we have 'access to the Father'.

Grace is not a 'thing'. It is not a substance that can be measured or a commodity to be distributed. It is the 'grace of the Lord Jesus Christ'. In essence, it is Jesus Himself.

We tend to be a generation of Christians who major on minor matters but do not seem to possess the true measure of the gospel in the knowledge of God. We do not really know God. At best we know about Him.

When you look at the Cross, what do you see? You see God's awesome faithfulness. Nothing - not even the instinct to spare His own Son - will turn him back from keeping His word.

The way in which God leads us is the way of following Christ in bearing the cross. Any "guidance" which contradicts this principle will lack the familiar autograph of Christ. Any "voice" which beckons us to forsake this pathway we will silence. For we will have come to recognize the accents of our Master. There is no voice like the voice of the One who has been crucified.

No short-cut that tries to bypass the patient unfolding of the true character of God, and our relationship to him as his children, can ever succeed in providing long-term spiritual therapy.

There is no such thing as genuine knowledge of God that does not show itself in obedience to His Word and will. The person who wants to know God but who has no heart to obey Him will never enter the sacred courts where God reveals Himself to the soul of man. God does not give divine knowledge to those who have no desire to glorify Him.

Christianity is Christ because there isn't anything else. There is no atonement that somehow can be detached from who the Lord Jesus is. There is no grace that can be attached to you transferred from Him. All there is, is Christ and your soul.

We must never forget - if we are to grow in grace, and therefore grow like Christ - that the One we trust, love, and serve is a crucified Savior. To follow Him means taking up the cross, as well as denying ourselves. It means a crucified life.

For worship is, essentially, the reverse of sin. Sin began (and begins) when we succumb to the temptation, "You shall be as gods." We make ourselves the center of the universe and dethrone God. By contrast, worship is giving God his true worth; it is acknowledging Him to be the Lord of all things, and the Lord of everything in our lives. He is, indeed, the Most High God!