Top 80 D. A. Carson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.”

— D. A. Carson

2. “The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it.”

— D. A. Carson

3. “Do you wish to see God’s love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God’s wrath? Look at the cross.”

— D. A. Carson

4. “Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.”

— D. A. Carson

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

— D. A. Carson

6. “Either worrying drives out prayer, or prayer drives out worrying.”

— D. A. Carson

7. “The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.”

— D. A. Carson

8. “There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.”

— D. A. Carson

9. “True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us.”

— D. A. Carson

10. “Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. We do not drift into spiritual life; we do not drift into disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. That means we must self-consciousl y set aside time to do nothing but pray.”

— D. A. Carson

11. “The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God’s story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible.”

— D. A. Carson

12. “All of us would be wiser if we would resolve never to put people down, except on our prayer lists.”

— D. A. Carson

13. “Both God’s love and God’s wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax – in the cross.”

— D. A. Carson

14. “Effectiveness in teaching the Bible is purchased at the price of much study, some of it lonely, all of it tiring.”

— D. A. Carson

15. “A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen.”

— D. A. Carson

16. “The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.”

— D. A. Carson

17. “If the text is God’s Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience.”

— D. A. Carson

18. “Our prayers may be an index of how small and self-centered our world is.”

— D. A. Carson

19. “It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father’s will-and it was his love for sinners like me.”

— D. A. Carson

20. “Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back.”

— D. A. Carson

21. “We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.”

— D. A. Carson

22. “We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray.”

— D. A. Carson

23. “Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.”

— D. A. Carson

24. “The way you lose the gospel is not by denying it, but by assuming it.”

— D. A. Carson

25. “Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.”

— D. A. Carson

26. “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

27. “Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death.”

— D. A. Carson

28. “To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.”

— D. A. Carson

29. “Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher’s sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity.”

— D. A. Carson

30. “God’s purpose for the men and women he redeems is not simply to have them believe certain truths but to transform them in a lifelong process that stretches toward heaven.”

— D. A. Carson

31. “The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross.”

— D. A. Carson

32. “To put the matter at its most basic, Paul’s prayer is the product of his passion for people. His unaffected fervency in prayer is not whipped-up emotionalism but the overflow of his love for brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. That means that if we are to improve our praying, we must strengthen our loving. As we grow in disciplined, self-sacrificing love, so we will grow in intercessory prayer. Superficially fervent prayers devoid of such love are finally phony, hollow, shallow.”

— D. A. Carson

33. “In all our pursuit of excellence, we must never worship excellence. That would simply be idolatrous.”

— D. A. Carson

34. “Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.”

— D. A. Carson

35. “A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.”

— D. A. Carson

36. “Not a drop of rain can fall outside the orb of Jesus’ sovereignty. All our days – our health, our illnesses, our joys, our victories, our tears, our prayers, and the answers to our prayers – fall within the sweep of the sovereignty of one who wears a human face, a thorn-shadowed face.”

— D. A. Carson

37. “It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.”

— D. A. Carson

38. “Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ.”

— D. A. Carson

39. “To walk into the unknown with a God of unqualified power and unfailing goodness is safer than a known way.”

— D. A. Carson

40. “If we harbor bitterness and resentment, praying is little more than wasted time and effort.”

— D. A. Carson

41. “The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God’s approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.”

— D. A. Carson

42. “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

43. “When God finds us so puffed up that we do not feel our need for him, it is an act of kindness on his part to take us down a peg or two; it would be an act of judgment to leave us in our vaulting self-esteem.”

— D. A. Carson

44. “Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship, worship rather than worship God.”

— D. A. Carson

45. “At the end of the day, prime allegiance must be to God himself, to God alone.”

— D. A. Carson

46. “Or have we ourselves become so caught up in the spirit of this age that we are content to be rich in information and impoverished in wisdom and godliness?”

— D. A. Carson

47. “It matters little whether you are the mother of active children who drain away your energy, an important executive in a major multinational corporation, a graduate student cramming for impending comprehensives, a plumber working overtime to put your children through college, or a pastor of a large church putting in ninety-hour weeks: at the end of the day, if you are too busy to pray, you are too busy. Cut something out.”

— D. A. Carson

48. “On the last day, God will ask, in effect, “What have you done with the salvation I bestowed on you?”

— D. A. Carson

49. “The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer.”

— D. A. Carson

50. “The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.”

— D. A. Carson