R. C. Sproul Quotes

It is one thing to believe in God; it is quite another to believe God.

When you feel depressed, it helps to actively change your environment. Go and do something different. Martin Luther conquered his depression by going outside to work in his garden. Surprisingly enough, one of the best ways to handle depression is to go to work immediately on the task you least enjoy. (The chances are your depression is caused by guilt feelings arising out of neglect of those tasks.)

Any conception of a god that is less than sovereign is an idol and no god at all.

Without God upholding the universe from moment to moment, nothing could continue to be.

The more I learn about God, the more aware I become of what I don’t know about him.

Change marriage and you change the world. Convince people that government, not God, lays down the rules for marriage, and they will believe more strongly that they determine right and wrong, that not even the world's rulers are subject to a higher authority.

I get irritated when I hear preachers say, "Come to Jesus and all your problems will be over." That's just simply a lie.

We persevere because we are preserved by our High Priest's intercession.

God’s sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it.

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.

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.

The rapture will not be secret but open and manifest. Its purpose will not be to whisk the elect away from the earth for a while until Christ returns for a 'second' Second Coming. The purpose of the rapture is to allow the saints to meet Jesus in the air as He returns and be included in His entourage during His triumphal descent from Heaven. His coming in this manner will be attended by the general resurrection, the final judgment, and the end of the world.

A Christian is not a skeptic. A Christian is a person with a burning heart, a heart set aflame with certainty of the resurrection.

We live in age of compromise, but if we stand on the bedrock of God’s truth, we will not bend with the winds of relativism and faithlessness.

Sin is not simply making bad choices or mistakes. Sin is having the desire in our hearts to do the will of the enemy of God.

It is imperative that the Christian, at the beginning of his pursuit to understand what true worship is, gets it clear that the object of our worship is to be God and God alone.

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.

Sometimes we behave and perform with our lives, not for God, but for an audience.

For the Christian, every tragedy is ultimately a blessing, or God is a liar.

We live in a culture where the truth claims of Christianity are not only rejected, they are ridiculed.

If you care about the slaughter of the innocent, then for God's sake, speak up.

The gospel is only good news when we understand the bad news.

The whole basis for our relationship with God is rooted and grounded in grace, in that which is not earned.

The most obscene symbol in human history is the Cross; yet in its ugliness it remains the most eloquent testimony to human dignity.

The very heart of worship, as the Bible makes clear, is the business of expressing, from the depths of our spirits, the highest possible honor we can offer before God.

Burning hearts are not nourished by empty heads

We tend to have mixed feelings about the holy. There is a sense in which we are at the same time attracted to it and repulsed by it. Something draws us toward it, while at the same time we want to run away from it. We can’t seem to decide which way we want it. Part of us yearns for the holy, while part of us despises it. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it.

Divorce Myths: 1. When love has gone out of a marriage, it is better to get divorced. 2. It is better for the children for the unhappy couple to divorce than to raise their children in the atmosphere of an unhappy marriage. 3. Divorce is the lesser of two evils. 4. You owe it to yourself. 5. Everyone's entitled to one mistake. 6. God led me to this divorce.

The problem in the church today is not the profession of faith, but it's possession.

God's graciousness is not totally removed from any individual during this lifetime. In hell, it is.

Our natural inclination is to hide ourselves from God.

If the final decision for the salvation of fallen sinners were left in the hands of fallen sinners, we would despair all hope that anyone would be saved.

The principle rule of interpreting Scripture is that Scripture interprets Scripture.

The modern movement of worship is designed to break down barriers between man and God, to remove the veil, as it were, from the fearsome holiness of God, which might cause us to tremble. It is designed to make us feel comfortable.

We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.

Like Muslims we assume that God will judge us "on balance." If our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds, we will arrive safely in heaven. But, alas, if our evil deeds outweigh our good ones, we will suffer the wrath of God in hell. We may be "marred" by sin but in no wise devastated by it. We still have the ability to balance our sins with our own righteousness. This is the most monstrous lie of all.

It is the Holy Spirit who inspired the Bible. It is the Holy Spirit who illumines the Bible.

The one place where the Christian can be naked without fear is in the presence of Christ.

Men and women who refuse to acknowledge God's existence do so, in the final analysis, because it is contrary to their manner of living. They do not want to bow to the moral claims of a holy God on their lives.

Christ told his disciples not to be anxious about tomorrow, but he never said not to consider tomorrow. Intelligent problem solving demands careful consideration of the future effects of present solutions.

We take comfort, however, that mystery is not a synonym for contradiction.

Genuine love for Jesus manifests itself in obedience to His commandments.

For the Arminian, salvation is possible for all but certain for none. In the Calvinist position, salvation is sure for God's elect.

We have no right to come before God at all, apart from the finished work of Christ.

It's not the wickedness of the pagan that breaks my heart. It's the compromise of the Christian that grieves my soul.

The promises of God for tomorrow are the anchor for believers today.

Just as the normative standard for the good and for the true is God, so the ultimate standard of beauty is God.

Satan can do only what the sovereign God allows him to do.