Top 100 Sinclair B. Ferguson Quotes (2022 Update)

1. “Jesus Christ is able to set us free because He has dealt with the sin that enslaves us.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

2. “God has chosen us. Our status is not a matter of our worthiness, but of His love.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

3. “The goal of theology is the worship of God. The posture of theology is on one’s knees. The mode of theology is repentance.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

4. “Repentance is a characteristic of the whole life, not the action of a single moment.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

5. “Humility is not simply feeling small and useless – like an inferiority complex. It is sensing how great and glorious God is, and seeing myself in that light.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

6. “Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

7. “Spiritual growth depends on two things: first a willingness to live according to the Word of God; second, a willingness to take whatever consequences emerge as a result.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

8. “We discover the will of God by a sensitive application of Scripture to our own lives.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

9. “Knowing God is your single greatest privilege as a Christian.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

10. “The only thing of my very own which I contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

11. “The conviction that Christian doctrine matters for Christian living is one of the most important growth points of the Christian life.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

12. “The weakest faith gets the same strong Christ as does the strongest faith.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

13. “Be obedient even when you do not know where obedience may lead you.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

14. “Christian contentment, therefore, is the direct fruit of having no higher ambition than to belong to the Lord and to be totally at His disposal in the place He appoints, at the time He chooses, with the provision He is pleased to make.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

15. “Thinking that I deserve heaven is a sure sign I have no understanding of the gospel.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

16. “Until we acknowledge our sin and guilt, we will never come to discover that it can be forgiven.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

17. “The true church is too different for the world to tolerate it.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

18. “How do we bring glory to God? The Bible’s short answer is: by growing more and more like Jesus Christ.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

19. “Every day we need our gaze redirected from ourselves to God.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

20. “The notion that we are children of God, his own sons and daughters, lies at the heart of all Christian theology, and is the mainspring of all Christian living.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

21. “My security as a Christian does not reside in the strength of my faith but in the indestructibili ty of my Savior.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

22. “Marriage, and the process of coming to it, is not heaven! It is the bonding together of two needy sinners in order to make a partnership which is substantially greater than either of them alone.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

23. “The foundation of our love for the Lord lies in the recognition of His holiness, our sinfulness, and His grace.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

24. “God is God; you are but one of His creatures. Your only joy is to be found in obeying Him, your true fulfillment is to be found in worshiping Him, your only wisdom is to be found in trusting and knowing Him.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

25. “The jewels of spiritual service are always quarried in the depths of spiritual experience. Never is this more true than in revival. Bend the church and save the people.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

26. “The holiness of God teaches us that there is only one way to deal with sin- radically, seriously, painfully, constantly. If you do not so live, you do not live in the presence of the Holy One of Israel.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

27. “We are far too good at analyzing what is wrong with the culture and far too myopic at analyzing what is wrong in the church.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

28. “When man became the measure of all things what was lost was man.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

29. “If you desire anything less for yourself than absolute obedience to God, a life of total devotion to the Lord, a life of absolute sin-less-ness – if you desire anything less, you are fighting against God’s desire for you.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

30. “Evil deeds are the fruit of an evil heart. They are not an aberration from our true self but a revelation of it.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

31. “You must know, rest in, think through, and act upon your new identity – you are in Christ.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

32. “The problem is not in the clarity of the revelation. The problem is in the darkness of the human mind.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

33. “Jesus has a special, compassionate concern for those who are broken and needy.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

34. “As the early church fathers delighted in saying, Christ took what was ours so that we might receive what was His.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

35. “Worship is not something we “work up,” it is something that “comes down” to us, from the character of God.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

36. “When we behold the glory of Christ in the gospel, it reorders the loves of our hearts, so we delight in him supremely, and the other things that have ruled our lives lose their enslaving power over us.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

37. “Living in the Spirit means a daily commitment to please Christ and not to please self.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

38. “No short-cut that tries to bypass the patient unfolding of the true character of God, and our relationship to him as his children, can ever succeed in providing long-term spiritual therapy.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

39. “God does something to us as well as for us through the cross. He persuades us that He loves us.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

40. “To be free from the possibility of discouragements would be more ‘spiritual’ than Jesus-and therefore not truly spiritual at all.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

41. “The benefits of the gospel are in Christ. They do not exist apart from him. They are ours only in him. They cannot be abstracted from him as if we ourselves could possess them independently of him.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

42. “Without the spirit of the Lord Jesus, we will look upon ‘the least of these’ simply as the least.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

43. “When we see salvation whole, its every single part is found in Christ, And so we must beware lest we derive the smallest drop from somewhere else.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

44. “Most Christians have more Bibles than they know what to do with, but have little understanding of what is in them.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

45. “The determining factor of my existence is no longer my past.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

46. “God made everything else but man “after its kind”? – that is, according to the purpose and destiny he envisaged for it. But he made man in His own image. Man is patterned on God! He was made to represent God – in created, human form.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

47. “In the New Testament the basic command of old covenant life, ‘Be holy as I am holy’, now means, ‘Become like Jesus.’ God involves himself in this work as the triune Lord: the Father commands it; the Son has died to provide the resources for it; the Spirit indwells us in order to effect it in our lives. As Augustine famously prayed, God commands what he wills and gives what he commands.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

48. “The Father did not require the death of Christ to persuade Him to love us. Christ died because the Father loves us.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

49. “When you look at the Cross, what do you see? You see God’s awesome faithfulness. Nothing – not even the instinct to spare His own Son – will turn him back from keeping His word.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

50. “Don’t tell me that you have a Reformed Church in the tradition of Calvin until you have the preaching of the Word every day of the week, devote Wednesday’s to prayer and have the church gather together for prayer.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson