John Stott Quotations

We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.

If Christ seldom makes offers without demands, He also seldom makes demands without offers. He offers His strength to enable us to meet His demands.

Indignation and compassion form a powerful combination. They are indispensable to vision, and therefore to leadership.

Although we have responsibilities to others, we are primarily accountable to God. It is before him that we stand, and to him that one day we must give an account. We should not therefore rate human opinion too highly...

The church is under orders. Evangelistic inactivity is disobedience.

To encounter Christ is to touch reality and experience transcendence. He gives us a sense of self-worth or personal significance, because He assures us of God's love for us. He sets us free from guilt because He died for us and from paralyzing fear because He reigns. He gives meaning to marriage and home, work and leisure, personhood and citizenship.

There is no biblical Christianity without the cross at its center.

Ambitions for self may be quite modest. . . . Ambitions for God, however, if they are to be worthy, can never be modest. There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God. How can we ever be content that he should acquire just a little more honour in the world? No. Once we are clear that God is King, then we long to see him crowned with glory and honour, and accorded his true place, which is the supreme place. We become ambitious for the spread of his kingdom and righteousness everywhere.

I have never been able to conjure up (as some great Evangelical missionaries have) the appalling vision of the millions who are not only perishing but will inevitably perish. On the other hand... I am not and cannot be a universalist. Between these extremes I cherish and hope the majority of the human race will be be saved. And I have a solid biblical basis for this belief.

The reason I am a Christian is not that it is nice, but that it is true.

Biblical righteousness is more than a private and personal affair; it includes social righteousness as well....Thus Christians are committed to hunger for righteousness in the whole human community as something pleasing to a righteous God.

God continues to speak through what He has spoken.

So close was Christ's connection with God that he equated a man's attitude to himself with the man's attitude to God.

God must speak to us before we have any liberty to speak to him. He must disclose to us who he is before we can offer him what we are in acceptable worship. The worship of God is always a response to the Word of God. Scripture wonderfully directs and enriches our worship.

Envy is the reverse side of a coin called vanity - Nobody is ever envious of others who is not first proud of himself.

If God speaks to us about himself and his own glorious greatness, we respond by humbling ourselves before him in worship... If He speaks to us about His commandments, we determine to obey them.

The question is not so much what the hand is doing (passing over some cash or a check) but what the heart is thinking while the hand is doing it.

God intends... our care of Creation to reflect our love for the Creator.

The overriding reason why we should take other people's cultures seriously is because God has taken ours seriously.

The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.

The meaning of atonement is not to be found in our penitence evoked by the sight of Calvary, but rather in what God did when in Christ on the cross He took our place and bore our sin.

Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service. If we do not use the mind that God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riches of God’s grace.

Theology is a serious quest for the true knowledge of God, undertaken in response to His self-revelation, illumined by Christian tradition, manifesting a rational inner coherence, issuing in ethical conduct, resonating with the contemporary world and concerned for the greater glory of God.

Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.

The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ's achievement. The law makes demands and bids us obey; the gospel brings promises and bids us believe.

The gospel creates the church, which spreads the gospel, which creates more churches, which in turn spread the gospel further ad infinitum.

God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.

If we love our neighbor we shall without doubt tell him the good news of Jesus. But equally if we truly love our neighbor we shall not stop there.

We are to be strong in faith, and soft in love.

Never use a gallon of words to express a spoonful of thought. Our unadorned word should be enough.

When Jesus is truly our Lord, He directs our lives and we gladly obey Him. Indeed, we bring every part of our lives under His lordship - our home and family, our sexuality and marriage, our job or unemployment, our money and possessions, our ambitions and recreations.

I believe that to preach or to expound the scripture is to open up the inspired text with such faithfulness and sensitivity that God’s voice is heard and His people obey Him

Good conduct arises out of good doctrine.

Don't neglect your critical faculties. Remember that God is a rational God, who has made us in His own image. God invites and expects us to explore His double revelation, in nature and Scripture, with the minds He has given us, and to go on in the development of a Christian mind to apply His marvellous revealed truth to every aspect of the modern and post-modern world.

There is no Christianity without the cross. If the cross is not central to our religion, ours is not the religion of Jesus.

We can all be stimulated to greater generosity by the known generosity of others.

Mission arises from the heart of God Himself and is communicated from His heart to ours. Mission is the global outreach of the global people of a global God.

When the Christian loses himself, he finds himself, he discovers his true identity.

If we truly worship God, acknowledging and adoring his infinite worth, we find ourselves impelled to make him known to others, in order that they may worship him too. Thus worship leads to witness, and witness in its turn to worship, in a perpetual circle.

We do not need to wait for the Holy Spirit to come: he came on the day of Pentecost. He has never left the church.

A gift is acceptable according to what the giver has, not according to what he has not.

Persecution is simply the clash between two irreconcilable value-systems.

Good works are indispensable to salvation - not as its ground or means, however, but as its consequence and evidence.

We have the means of evangelizing our country, but they are slumbering in the pews of our churches.

The nations are not gathered in automatically. If God has promised to bless "all the families of the earth," he has promised to do so "through Abraham's seed" (Genesis 12:3, 22:18). Now we are Abraham's seed by faith, and the earth's families will be blessed only if we go to them with the gospel. That is God's plain purpose.

It is a great comfort to know that our judge will be none other than our savior.

The good news is the gospel of God, about Christ, according to Scripture, for the nations, unto the obedience of faith, and for the sake of the Name.

[Christian rebellion] arises from the doctrine of mankind made in the image of God, and therefore protests against all forms of dehumanization. It sets itself against the social injustices which insult God the Creator, seeks to protect human beings from oppression and longs to liberate them… it protests against every authoritarian regime, whether of the left or of the right, which discriminates against minorities, denies people their civil rights, forbids the free expression of opinions or imprisons people for their views alone.

God condemned sin in Christ, so that holiness might appear in us.

Pride is more than the first of the seven deadly sins; it is itself the essence of all sin.

Circumcision stands for a religion of human achievement, of what man can do by his own good works; Christ stands for a religion of divine achievement, of what God has done through the finished work of Christ.

Moved by the perfection of His holy love, God in Christ substituted Himself for us sinners. That is the heart of the cross of Christ.

God has clothed His thoughts in words, and there is no way to know Him except by knowing the Scriptures.

We should travel light and live simply. Our enemy is not possessions but excess.

As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.

Christians believe that true worship is the highest and noblest activity of which man, by the grace of God, is capable.

A deaf church is a dead church: that is an unalterable principle.

There is evidence for the deity of Jesus -- good, strong, historical , cumulative evidence; evidence to which an honest person can subscribe without committing intellectual suicide.

The cross is not just a badge to identify us...it is also the compass which gives us our bearings in a disoriented world.

Word and worship belong indissolubly to each other. All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God, because it is the adoration of His name. Therefore, acceptable worship is impossible without preaching. For preaching is making known the name of the Lord, and worship is praising the name of the Lord made known.

We cannot be content with an evangelism which does not lead to the drawing of converts into the church, nor with a church order whose principle of cohesion is a superficial social camaraderie instead of a spiritual fellowship with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does he sustain it? Has he committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for his own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.

The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice-and so the pain-of the cross.

Perhaps the transformation of the disciples of Jesus is the greatest evidence of all for the resurrection.

Faith, Hope & Love. Faith is directed towards God, love towards others (both within the Christian fellowship and beyond it) and hope towards the future, in particular, the glorious coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Similarly, faith rests of the past; love works in the present; hope looks to the future. Every Christian without exception is a believer, a lover and a hoper. Faith, hope and love are three sure evidences of regeneration by the Holy Spirit.

Lord Jesus, I pray that this day I may take up my cross and follow you.

Every powerful movement has had its philosophy which has gripped the mind, fired the imagination and captured the devotion of its adherents.

Do not be content with a static Christian life. Determine rather to grow in faith and love, in knowledge and holiness.

When we look at the cross we see the justice, love, wisdom and power of God. It is not easy to decide which is the most luminously revealed, whether the justice of God in judging sin, or the love of God in bearing the judgment in our place, or the wisdom of God in perfectly combining the two, or the power of God in saving those who believe. For the cross is equally an act, and therefore a demonstration, of God’s justice, love, wisdom and power. The cross assures us that this God is the reality within, behind and beyond the universe.

A Christian's freedom from anxiety is not due to some guaranteed freedom from trouble, but to the folly of worry and especially to the confidence that God is our Father, that even permitted suffering is within the orbit of His care.

The Bible isn’t about people trying to discover God, but about God reaching out to find us.

No man has ever appreciated the gospel until the law has first revealed him to himself. It is only against the inky blackness of the night sky that the stars begin to appear, and it is only against the dark background of sin and judgment that the gospel shines forth.

Apathy is the acceptance of the unacceptable.

The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought.

Baptism with water is the sign and seal of baptism with the Spirit, as much as it is of the forgiveness of sins. Water-baptism is the initiatory Christian rite, because Spirit-baptism is the initiatory Christian experience.

No man preaches his sermon well to others if he does not first preach it to his own heart.

Why is it that some Christians cross land and sea, continents and cultures, as missionaries? What on earth impels them? It is not in order to commend a civilization, an institution or an ideology, but rather a person, Jesus Christ, whom they believe to be unique.

At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself.

Christianity is in its very essence a resurrection religion. The concept of resurrection lies at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed.

...The first and great evidence of our walking by the Spirit or being filled with the Spirit is not some private mystical experience of our own, but our practical relationships of love with other people.

There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God.

Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his.

Faith's only function is to receive what grace offers.

No theology is genuinely Christian which does not arise from and focus on the cross.

Scripture is the royal scepter by which King Jesus rules his church

The essence of apostasy is changing sides from that of the crucified to that of the crucifier.

The command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men... but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God.

The gospel is NOT preached if Christ is not preached.

Faith is a reasoning trust, a trust which reckons thoughtfully and confidently upon the trustworthiness of God.

The chief reason why the Christian believes in the divine origin of the Bible is that Jesus Christ Himself taught it.

The truth is that there are such things as Christian tears, and too few of us ever weep them.

Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.

These then are the marks of the ideal Church - love, suffering, holiness, sound doctrine, genuineness, evangelism and humility. They are what Christ desires to find in His churches as He walks among them.

The modern world detests authority but worships relevance. Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance, and that the secret of both is Jesus Christ

The hallmark of an authentic evangelicalism is not the uncritical repetition of old traditions but the willingness to submit every tradition, however ancient, to fresh biblical scrutiny and, if necessary, reform.

Nobody can call himself a Christian who does not worship Jesus.

Truth without love is too hard; love without truth is too soft.

His authority on earth allows us to dare to go to all the nations. His authority in heaven gives us our only hope of success. And His presence with us leaves us with no other choice.

The symbol of the religion of Jesus is the cross, not the scales.

The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of its worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified.