Mark Dever Quotes

Christian proclamation might make the gospel audible, but Christians living together in local congregations make the gospel visible (see John 13:34-35). The church is the gospel made visible.

We live in a time when people are increasingly skittish about evangelism - Christians and non-Christians alike. People are suspicious of evangelism, and misunderstand it, which contributes to our reluctance to share the gospel. When you add our fear of others' reactions as well as our natural laziness to the equation, it's not hard to see why we make such little progress in sharing our faith.

We do live best in this world when we keep the next in mind.

We mustn't be content to just sit around pointing out the errors in others; we actually need to be sharing the gospel and praying for people to be converted.

It's fine to deal with people's doubts and explain why they have good reasons to believe in Christ. But until we tell them the good news of Jesus Christ, we haven't done our job. They need a saviour that God has provided them in Christ. Once they know that, we can do as much apologetics as we need to.

Testimonies are great things about what the Lord has done for us, but no-one will be offended when you talk about what God has done for you. You need to be specific about sin, about Christ's death on the cross, about others' need for a saviour, and about their need to repent and trust in Christ.

We do not fail in our evangelism if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not subsequently converted; we fail only if we do not faithfully tell the gospel at all.

Evangelism is not simply looking at someone and saying, "Look, you have to become a Christian". Instead, an evangelist tells us the truth about who God is, and explains where we stand as a result of that. People can ignore us - indeed, they have every legal right to do so.

I think many people in the church are probably concerned that they can't answer all the questions that might come up. I am sure this affects people by playing on their doubts - especially if they have their own questions that they are wrestling with.

Discipling involves instruction and imitation.

If joy or urgency are missing from our presentation of the gospel, then our testimony to Christ will be missing that sort of fullness that we find in the New Testament.

Our examples of enduring hardship are often more powerful than our stories of success and triumph.

I assume that normally the Lord will be bringing people to himself through the instrumentality of the preached word. However, we have to be very careful that we don't assume that if we are 'X' faithful in evangelism, then we will see 'Y' results right now. It doesn't work like that.

I don't see a clerical class in the New Testament to which evangelism has been delegated. Preaching is not the only way to evangelize; it can happen in everyday conversations too. And you don't need a special gift to witness to the Lord in these situations.

God can use even stray, honest comments to bring people to himself.

We are called to love others. We share the gospel because we love people. And we don't share the gospel because we don't love people. Instead, we wrongly fear them. We don't want to cause awkwardness. We want their respect, and after all, we figure, if we try to share the gospel with them, we'll look foolish! And so we are quiet. We protect our pride at the cost of their souls. In the name of not wanting to look weird, we are content to be complicit in their being lost.

It doesn't matter whether we live in the 19th or 21st centuries; we face the same basic problems that everyone who lives between the Fall and the return of Christ faces.

The more you come to know the Bible - both in reading it extensively and also meditating on it deeply - the more integrated your understanding of all of life will be. And this means that there will be fewer steps between what you are doing at work and sharing your faith in Christ.

Evangelism is not imposing anything on anyone; it is simply sharing the truth.

Prayer is the preview of God's action.

I want to defend the right of employees to share the gospel in appropriate situations. Every situation requires wisdom and insight. I don't think it's wise to say, "Share the gospel every time you can". I can see all kinds of problems that come from that approach.

What really concerns me is for Christians to understand the fundamentals of evangelism in a way that is helpful in the contemporary scene.

Your plans are fine, as long as you realize God has the right to change them.

Today is what the Lord has prepared you for.

Let's say you don't want to stress the urgency of the gospel. Imagine that you are a hyper-Calvinist, and you just figure that people's salvation is a matter for the sovereignty of God. Well, if that's the case, there will never be the heartfelt pleading that you would see in a Spurgeon or an Edwards, or in the Apostle Paul where he pours out his heart in Romans 9 and 10 for the Jewish people.

I'll tell you what's more important than all the commentaries in your library: prayer.

I don't mind talking about a football game - that's fine. I don't want Christians to be unnatural. But I do want to hear them talking fully, freely and naturally of the things of the Lord in their own lives too.

There is no gospel without the offence. This is God's wisdom. It never seems sensible to us in our flesh.

According to the New Testament, the church is primarily a body of people who profess and give evidence that they have been saved by God's grace alone, for His glory alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

There are times when the gospel just seems to be powerfully at work in a nation, and thousands upon thousands are converted. If you think about what has happened in Latin America, Africa and East Asia all in the last hundred years, it is breathtaking. We have seen an expansion of the gospel as we have never seen before in the history of the church.

Sadly, there are some fine Christian people who believe that the only way to advance the gospel is to pray for revival and nothing else. You don't know if they have any non-Christian friends or if they have ever shared the gospel with anybody in the last 30 years. It's depressing going to prayer meetings like that. I don't want to pray like that.

A church is not a Fortune 500 company. It's not simply another nonprofit organization, nor is it a social club. In fact, a healthy church is unlike any organization that man has ever devised, because man didn't devise it.

I do want to pray for the Lord to glorify himself and, yes, I also will pray for an outpouring of his Spirit, but I also will rejoice in what he is doing now, and I will try to be a faithful steward of the gospel by preaching it "in season and out of season", as Paul reminds us. So I want to be careful not to make an idol out of revival, or to rely upon it to the point where I don't plan for evangelism.

I recognize that not all of us may have the same abilities and talents in sharing the gospel. But I want to keep the heat on all of us for getting the good news out there.

Keep going until you get good counsel that is persuasive for you that you should go elsewhere.

Do you want to know that your new life is real? Commit yourself to a local group of saved sinners. Try to love them. Don’t just do it for three weeks. Don’t just do it for six months. Do it for years. And I think you’ll find out, and others will, too, whether or not you love God. The truth will show itself

Christians are defined not by our heritage, but by our mission; not by our blood, but by His.

Evangelists have absolutely no desire to physically or emotionally coerce anyone. In a sense, we are like doctors: we have a duty to tell you the truth, care for you, argue with you (if that is useful), but we can't compel you to do anything.

We need the word proclaimed so that we hear the gospel clearly, but then it's also very natural to have people talk about the Christian faith in ordinary conversation.

Our culture is becoming more hostile to the gospel. This trend may be more established in Australia than in the USA, but it's now certainly the case that the postmodern mindset is dominant, particularly in the media. Therefore, when we start speaking in terms of certainties, we sound scary to other people.

Some believers are faithful in the way that they live, but at the end of the day, they will not share the gospel with as many people as someone else who has special gifts from God.

Pride causes us to care more about what our non-Christian friends think of us than what God will do to them in their sin.

To evangelize properly by delivering the gospel, we need to follow God's agenda.

The difference between apologetics and evangelism is that in apologetics, you are answering objections that the world raises, whereas in evangelism, you are bringing the message that Christ brought. So unbelievers tend to set the agenda in apologetics, and you set the agenda in evangelism.

I heard about a pastor in a church of 5,000 people who employed two seminary students whose main responsibility was to get four new people baptized each week. When asked, "What happens if they can't meet the quota?", his response was, "Then I'll find two students who can". This man wasn't even remotely interested in true gospel preaching. He was results-driven.

We are all called to initiate involvement in each other’s lives... We covenant together to work and pray for unity, to walk together in love, to exercise care and watchfulness over each other, to faithfully admonish and entreat one another as occasion may require, to assemble together, to pray for each other, to rejoice and to bear with each other, and to pray for God’s help in all this.

We may be sinking in the North Atlantic in the most famous ship disaster of all time, but God can still use us to reach out and save others through our witness.

All evangelists want to do is share a message about the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. But our world is confused by the confidence we have in the gospel, and is threatened by it. Satan, I am sure, causes those things to echo in the world to increase this sort of common confusion.