Top 80 D. A. Carson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one, it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.”

— D. A. Carson

52. “The gospel of the crucified Messiah must transform not only our beliefs but our behavior.”

— D. A. Carson

53. “Sin is social: although it is first and foremost defiance of God, there is no sin that does not touch the lives of others. Even.”

— D. A. Carson

54. “One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most “evangelistic” movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.”

— D. A. Carson

55. “There is no long-range effective teaching of the Bible that is not accompanied by long hours of ongoing study of the Bible.”

— D. A. Carson

56. “Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God’s love, they cannot escape the cross.”

— D. A. Carson

57. “That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble.”

— D. A. Carson

58. “The impact of philosophical pluralism on Western culture is incalculable. It touches virtually every discipline – history, art, literature, anthropology, education, philosophy, psychology, the social sciences, even, increasingly, the “hard” sciences – but it has already achieved popularity in the public square, even when its existence is not recognized. It achieves its greatest victory in redefining religious pluralism so as to render heretical the idea that heresy is possible.”

— D. A. Carson

59. “The cross not only establishes what we are to preach, but how we are to preach. It prescribes what Christian leaders must be and how Christians must view Christian leaders. It tells us how to serve and draws us onward in discipleship until we understand what it means to be world Christians. The.”

— D. A. Carson

60. “How much would our churches be transformed if each of us made it a practice to thank God for others and then to tell those others what it is about them that we thank God for?”

— D. A. Carson

61. “Faithful Christian leaders must make the connections between creed and conduct, between the cross and how to live. And they must exemplify this union in their own lives. In.”

— D. A. Carson

62. “What we actually do reflects our highest priorities. That means we can proclaim our commitment to prayer until the cows come home, but unless we actually pray, our actions disown our words.”

— D. A. Carson

63. “Some forms of absolutism are not bad; they may even be heroic.”

— D. A. Carson

64. “To have faith in the gospel message is not the same thing as responding positively to the story of Superman, who is also said to invade our turf from beyond. Although biblical faith has a major ‘subjective’ or ‘personal’ or ‘existential’ component, it depends even more on its object – on the other side of the ‘window’.”

— D. A. Carson

65. “The new command398 is simple enough for a toddler to memorize and appreciate, profound enough that the most mature believers are repeatedly embarrassed at how poorly they comprehend it and put it into practice: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

— D. A. Carson

66. “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

67. “Be patient; it is better to be a chastened saint than a carefree sinner.”

— D. A. Carson

68. “In a theistic universe, there can be nothing worse than being truly abandoned by God himself. The worst of hell’s torments is that men and women are truly abandoned by God. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

— D. A. Carson

69. “It is painfully easy for us to come to all kinds of critical points in ministry, service, family development, changes in vocation, and, precisely because we have enjoyed spiritual victories in the past, approach these matters with sophisticated criteria but without prayer. We love our independence. As a result we may repeatedly stumble and fall, because although we have exercised all our intellectual ingenuity we have not sought God’s face, we have not begged him for his wisdom.”

— D. A. Carson

70. “Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers.”

— D. A. Carson

71. “Such dangers aside, you can greatly improve your prayer life if you combine these first two principles: set apart time for praying, and then use practical ways to impede mental drift.”

— D. A. Carson

72. “We need not think that the only sins that will keep us from prayer are large and gross. We so often fall at the subtle points.”

— D. A. Carson

73. “The only thing of transcendent importance to human beings is the knowledge of God. This knowledge does not belong to those who endlessly focus on themselves. Those who truly come to know God delight just to know him. He becomes their center. They think of him, delight in him, boast of him.”

— D. A. Carson

74. “God’s valuation of his people is established by his valuation of Christ.”

— D. A. Carson

75. “Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like.”

— D. A. Carson

76. “At heart, therefore, they really have grasped the message of Christ crucified, even if they have not brought their lives into conformity with this message.”

— D. A. Carson

77. “It is the truth and power of the gospel that must change people’s lives, not the glamour of our oratory or the emotional power of our stories.”

— D. A. Carson

78. “The ultimate ground of our rejoicing can never be our circumstances, even though we as Christians recognize that our circumstances are providentially arranged. If our joy derives primarily from our circumstances, then when our circumstances change, we will be miserable. Our delight must be in the Lord himself. That is what enables us to live with joy above our circumstances.”

— D. A. Carson

79. “The heart of our lostness is our profound self-focus. We do not want to know him, if knowing him is on his terms. We are happy to have a god we can more or less manipulate; we do not want a god to whom we admit that we are rebels in heart and mind, that we do not deserve his favor, and that our only hope is in his pardoning and transforming grace.”

— D. A. Carson

80. “Christians refuse to believe that there are only two options in engaging our culture: either to assimilate or to separate, to capitulate or to evade, to over-contextualize or to under-adapt. Jeremiah 29 encourages God’s people not to accommodate the foreign culture but to move in and get involved in the life of the city economically and culturally. The prophet is asking the people to be spiritually bicultural. They are being called neither to worship.”

— D. A. Carson

81. “Some honest differences of opinion among genuine believers could be resolved if they would take the time to sort out why they are looking at things differently and if they would take their views and attitudes and submit them afresh, self-critically, to the Scriptures.”

— D. A. Carson

82. “Where there are disagreements of principle, argue them out. Take out your Bibles, think things through, find out why you are disagreeing, and be willing to be corrected.”

— D. A. Carson

83. “Happy the Christian who sees in every sin a monster that could easily snare him eternally, were it not for the grace of God.”

— D. A. Carson