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D.A. Carson QUOTES

1 " ... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance. "

― D.A. Carson , A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

2 " The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him. "

― D.A. Carson , A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

3 " Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude:

Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder. "

― D.A. Carson , The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

4 " In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because [it's] uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation's grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized. "

― D.A. Carson , The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

5 " You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. "

― D.A. Carson , Worship by the Book

6 " We are dealing with God's thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly. "

― D.A. Carson

7 " Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so. "

― D.A. Carson

8 " Although there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rather than worship God. As a brother put it to me, it’s a bit like those who begin by admiring the sunset and soon begin to admire themselves admiring the sunset. "

― D.A. Carson , Worship by the Book

9 " But if we decide contextually specific questions of synonymy on the basis of the total semantic range of each word, any synonymy in any context is virtually impossible. "

― D.A. Carson

10 " So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. "

― D.A. Carson , Worship by the Book

D.A. Carson QUOTES

11 " Forbearance and genuine tenderheartedness are much tougher than niceness, and sometimes…tough love is confrontational (p. 54). "

― D.A. Carson , Love in Hard Places

12 " People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated. "

― D.A. Carson

13 " A little self-doubt will do no harm and may do a great deal of good: we will be more open to learn and correct our mistakes. But too much will shackle and stifle us with deep insecurities and make us so much aware of methods that we may overlook truth itself. "

― D.A. Carson , Exegetical Fallacies

14 " . . . the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything that culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all, sentimentalized. . . . Today most people seem to have little difficulty believing in the love of God; they have far more difficultly believing in the justice of God, the wrath of God and the non-contradictory truthfulness of an omniscient God. "The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God "

― D.A. Carson

15 " Emulate those who are interested in the well-being of others, not in their own. Be on the alert for Christians who really do exemplify this basic Christian attitude, this habit of helpfulness. They are never the sort who strut their way into leadership with inflated estimates of their own importance. They are the kind who cheerfully pick up after other people. They are not offended if no one asks about them; they are too busy asking about others. They are the kind who are constantly seeking to do good spiritually, to do good materially, to do good emotionally. They are committed to the well-being of others. "

― D.A. Carson , Basics for Believers

16 " To appeal…to some ill-defined and sentimental notion of love as the ground for contravening Scripture may be a lot of things, but it is not Christian love (p. 174). "

― D.A. Carson , Love in Hard Places

17 " The broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity. "

― D.A. Carson

18 " If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior. "

― D.A. Carson , A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

19 " ...sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances, rather than change our circumstances. "

― D.A. Carson , For the Love of God (Vol. 1), 1: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God's Word

20 " However hard some things are to understand, it is never helpful to start picking and choosing biblical truths we find congenial, as if the Bible is an open-shelved supermarket where we are at perfect liberty to choose only the chocolate bars. For the Christian, it is God's Word, and it is not negotiable. What answers we find may not be exhaustive, but they give us the God who is there, and who gives us some measure of comfort and assurance. The alternative is a god we manufacture, and who provides no comfort at all. Whatever comfort we feel is self-delusion, and it will be stripped away at the end when we give an account to the God who has spoken to us, not only in Scripture, but supremely in his Son Jesus Christ. "

― D.A. Carson , How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil