Top 100 Sinclair B. Ferguson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Karl Barth once wittily remarked, “One can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Repentance, turning from sin, and degrees of conviction of sin do not constitute the grounds on which Christ is offered to us. They may constitute ways in which the Spirit works as the gospel makes its impact on us. But they never form the warrant for repentance and faith.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

56. “Regeneration, however it is described, is a divine activity in us, in which we are not the actors but the recipients.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

57. “The real test that I believe that God is love is that tragedies don’t separate me from the conviction that God is love.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

58. “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

59. “There is nothing more important to learn about Christian growth than this: Growing in grace means becoming like Christ.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

60. “The ongoing function of God’s law is not to serve as a standard to be met for justification but as a guide for Christian living. Thus, according to the Confession of Faith: True believers be not under the law as a covenant of works to be thereby justified or condemned yet it is of great use to them as well as to others as a rule of life.34.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

61. “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

62. “Do I learn through dark providences, or simply seem relieved when they are over?”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

63. “Secular humanism debases the human.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

64. “Man’s insulting God is not reversed by our insulting man.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

65. “We best defend the Lord’s glory by speaking first TO Him about unbelieving men rather than speaking first ABOUT Him to unbelieving men.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

66. “There is a difference between going to a service “for the worship” and going to a service “to worship the Lord.” The distinction appears to be a minor one, but it may imply the difference between the worship of God and the worship of music!”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

67. “You do not become a master musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true of the life of prayer.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

68. “Anyone who comes to grips with the issues raised in The Marrow of Modern Divinity will almost certainly grow by leaps and bounds in understanding three things: the grace of God, the Christian life, and the very nature of the gospel itself.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

69. “No one can will the will to will what it will not will!”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

70. “It’s the centrality of the Word and not the person who preaches it that’s important.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

71. “Yes, people will tell us they believe in a “God of love.” But they are self-deceived, and their lives reveal it. They neither love Him with heart, soul, mind, and strength in return, nor do they worship Him with zeal and energy. The truth is that their mantra “My God is a God of love” is a smokescreen, a phantasm of their imagination. Underneath it all is a deep mistrust of God – otherwise, why not yield the whole of life in joyful abandon to whatever He says or asks?”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

72. “If you are justified, you can no more be unjustified than Christ can be pulled down from heaven.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

73. “The human heart” wrote Calvin, “has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

74. “True faith takes its character and quality from its object. Its strength therefore depends on the character of Christ. Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

75. “I began to read for myself and realised that here was somebody who could teach me profound biblical theology, get inside my heart with his spiritual analysis, and help me to become a minister of the gospel, which is what I wanted to be.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

76. “Christianity is Christ because there isn’t anything else. There is no atonement that somehow can be detached from who the Lord Jesus is. There is no grace that can be attached to you transferred from Him. All there is, is Christ and your soul.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

77. “Confessional orthodoxy coupled with a view of a heavenly Father whose love is conditioned on his Son’s suffering, and further conditioned by our repentance, leads inevitably to a restriction in the preaching of the gospel. Why? Because it leads to a restriction in the heart of the preacher that matches the restriction he sees in the heart of God!”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

78. “We can never reflect too much on God’s grace.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

79. “Failure to deal with the presence of sin can often be traced back to spiritual amnesia – forgetting our new, true, real identity. As a believer, I am someone who has been delivered from the dominion of sin and who therefore is free and motivated to fight against the remnants of sin in my heart. You must know, rest in, think through, and act upon your new identity – you are in Christ.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

80. “Thankfulness grows best in the seed-bed of conviction, just as some plants must be placed in the soil in the winter if they are to flower in the summer.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

81. “So long as Jesus Christ is there, in heaven before God for us, our salvation will last.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

82. “Where God is at the center of things, worship inevitably follows.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

83. “God’s promises are not fortune cookies. We do not use them in order to get a spiritual “fix” for the day.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

84. “When I am tempted and feel the power of sin and its tug on my affections, the gospel gives me something to say: ‘Christ bled and died for this sin – I will therefore have nothing to do with it. I am now united to Christ by the indwelling of the Spirit – how can I drag him into my sin?”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

85. “The gospel is designed to deliver us from this lie. For it reveals that behind and manifested in the coming of Christ and his death for us is the love of a Father who gives us everything he has: first his Son to die for us and then his Spirit to live within us.27.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

86. “The subtle danger here should be obvious: if we speak of the cross of Christ as the cause of the love of the Father, we imply that behind the cross and apart from it he may not actually love us at all. He needs to be “paid” a ransom price in order to love us.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

87. “For if we seek salvation, the very name ofJesus teaches us that he possesses it.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

88. “Seeing human need with perfect clarity, Jesus felt it with unparalleled intensity.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

89. “Thus the motivation, energy and drive for holiness are all found in the reality and power of God’s grace in Christ. And so if I am to make any progress in sanctification, the place where I must always begin is the gospel of the mercy of God to me in Christ Jesus.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

90. “Thus the essence of legalism is rooted not merely in our view of law as such but in a distorted view of God as the giver of his law.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

91. “That life begins with God’s working, not with our “doing.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

92. “The Son of God came to dwell in human flesh for us in order that He might come to dwell in us by His Spirit.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

93. “Those who are most conscious of forgiveness are invariably those who have been most acutely convicted of their sin.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

94. “Fast-forward to Calvary and the coming of the Spirit. As Moses ascended Mount Sinai and brought down the Law on tablets of stone, now Christ has ascended into the heavenly Mount, but in contrast to Moses, he has sent down the Spirit who rewrites the law not now merely on tablets of stone but in our hearts.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

95. “In undiluted monergism, He called the galaxies into being, and He gives life to the dead in the same way.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

96. “Jesus’ sinlessness should not be equated with emotionlessness.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

97. “Our thinking about who we are as Christians should not begin with what we can discover about ourselves by self-analysis. Rather, it begins with what God says about those who trust in Christ.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

98. “The fallacy here? The subtle movement from seeing forsaking sin as the fruit of grace that is rooted in election, to making the forsaking of sin the necessary precursor for experiencing that grace. Repentance, which is the fruit of grace, thus becomes a qualification for grace. This.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

99. “Inerrancy matters because it honors the Spirit, who wants to honor the Son, who wants to honor the Father.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

100. “Such contentment is never the result of the momentary decision of the will. It cannot be produced merely by having a well-ordered and thought-through time- and life-management plan calculated to guard us against unexpected twists of divine providence. No, true contentment means embracing the Lord’s will in every aspect of His providence simply because it is His providence. It involves what we are in our very being, not just what we do and can accomplish.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson