Top 40 Mark Dever Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “By the grace of God I am what I am.”

— Mark Dever

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

— Mark Dever

3. “The church is the gospel made visible.”

— Mark Dever

4. “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.”

— Mark Dever

5. “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.”

— Mark Dever

6. “A gospel that in no way offends the sinner has not been understood.”

— Mark Dever

7. “Forgetfulness of God’s grace is one of the greatest tools in the enemy’s war against our souls.”

— Mark Dever

8. “If you have no interest in actually committing yourself to an actual group of gospel-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, you might question whether you belong to the body of Christ at all!”

— Mark Dever

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

— Mark Dever

10. “We don’t fail in our evangelism if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not converted; we fail only if we don’t faithfully tell the gospel at all. Evangelism itself isn’t converting people; it’s telling them that they need to be converted and telling them how they can be.”

— Mark Dever

11. “The gospel of Christ has never needed the gimmicks of man to effect conversion in the soul.”

— Mark Dever

12. “When a person becomes a Christian, he doesn’t just join a local church because it’s a good habit for growing in spiritual maturity. He joins a local church because it’s the expression of what Christ has made him – a member of the body of Christ.”

— Mark Dever

13. “Briefly, the Regulative Principle states that everything we do in a corporate worship gathering must be clearly warranted by Scripture. Clear warrant can either take the form of an explicit biblical command, or a good and necessary implication of a biblical text.”

— Mark Dever

14. “The church arises only from the gospel. And a distorted church usually coincides with a distorted gospel.”

— Mark Dever

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

— Mark Dever

16. “Today is what the Lord has prepared you for.”

— Mark Dever

17. “Sin claims to free but in fact it kills.”

— Mark Dever

18. “I’ll tell you what’s more important than all the commentaries in your library: prayer.”

— Mark Dever

19. “Can we say anything further about what discipling is? I’ve said it’s helping others follow Jesus. It’s doing them spiritual good. But to fill all that out, discipling is initiating a relationship in which you teach, correct, model, and love. It takes great humility.”

— Mark Dever

20. “Discipling involves instruction and imitation.”

— Mark Dever

21. “If you are not a member of the church you regularly attend, you may well be going to hell.”

— Mark Dever

22. “As long as quick numerical growth remains the primary indicator of church health, the truth will be compromised. Instead, churches must once again begin measuring success not in terms of numbers but in terms of fidelity to the Scriptures.”

— Mark Dever

23. “Correct division should be preferred over corrupt unity.”

— Mark Dever

24. “God’s eternal plan has always been to display his glory not just through individuals but through a corporate body.”

— Mark Dever

25. “God’s Word has always been His chosen instrument to create, convict, convert, and conform His people.”

— Mark Dever

26. “Part of being a Christian is recognizing that sin deceives us, and we need other believers to help us see the things we cannot see about ourselves. Joining a church, I’ve often said, is like throwing paint on the invisible man. New sins become visible in the course of our discipling relationships.”

— Mark Dever

27. “For a Christian, our fears about the future are rooted in those places where our will differs from God’s will.”

— Mark Dever

28. “But if you define success in terms of faithfulness, then you are in a position to persevere, because you are released from the demand of immediately observable results, freeing you for faithfulness to the Gospel’s message and methods, leaving numbers to the Lord.”

— Mark Dever

29. “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.”

— Mark Dever

30. “Suffering can serve us. Suffering tests our trust in God’s promises. And we have a great interest in knowing the truth about our trust in Him.”

— Mark Dever

31. “Prayer is the preview of God’s action.”

— Mark Dever

32. “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.”

— Mark Dever

33. “Unbelief is like gravity, it’s always pulling down on the authority of Scripture.”

— Mark Dever

34. “Friend, the church finds its life as it listens to the Word of God. It finds its purpose as it lives out and displays the Word of God. The church’s job is to listen and then to echo.”

— Mark Dever

35. “Humility is not an ‘added extra,’ one of the lesser Christian virtues. If you don’t have humility, you may be lost.”

— Mark Dever

36. “Membership is the church’s corporate endorsement of a person’s salvation.”

— Mark Dever

37. “Churches don’t need programs so much as they need cultures of discipling, cultures where each member prioritizes the spiritual health of others.”

— Mark Dever

38. “Avoiding the doctrine of Hell is one step away from denying it altogether.”

— Mark Dever

39. “Our fears lie to us about how important they are.”

— Mark Dever

40. “Our individual lives alone are not a sufficient witness. Our lives together as church communities are the confirming echo of our witness.”

— Mark Dever

41. “When our eyes fall from God to humanity, social ills replace sin, horizontal problems replace the fundamental vertical problem between us and God, winning elections eclipses winning souls.”

— Mark Dever

42. “To live as God meant us to live, we must trust him, and – to no small extent – trust those made in his image. Everyone in the Bible from Adam and Eve to the rogue rulers in the book of Revelation showed their evil fundamentally by denying God’s authority and usurping it as their own.”

— Mark Dever

43. “Ask your friends what God has been teaching you about himself. Small groups can also be useful for facilitating these kinds of relationships.”

— Mark Dever

44. “Discipling in the gospel means that sometimes you lead the way in confessing weakness or sin. By doing so, you demonstrate what it looks like not to find your justification in yourself, but in Christ. And so you live transparently and honestly.”

— Mark Dever

45. “A cold heart that does not love suggests one of two things. Either it has never been forgiven, or it does not appreciate the depth of its forgiveness. In fact, much of our growth in Christ is simply growth in our understanding of what Christ has done for us.”

— Mark Dever

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

— Mark Dever

47. “Too many churches today have preachers who look to the culture around them not simply for the most effective methods of communicating their message but for the most effective message to be preached.”

— Mark Dever

48. “Local churches exist to display God’s glory to the nations. We do that by fixing our eyes on the gospel of Jesus Christ, trusting him for salvation, and then loving one another with God’s own holiness, unity, and love.”

— Mark Dever