Inspirational Quotes by Sinclair B. Ferguson

“An inability to encourage someone else is usually rooted in an absorption with self that is blind to the needs or gifts of others, or a pride that cannot bring itself to praise God's grace in them.”

“Such experiences can make us bewail how the Western world gives itself over annually to its Claus-mass or commerce-mass. We celebrate a reworked pagan Saturnalia of epic proportions, one in which the only connection with the incarnation is semantic. Santa is worshiped, not the Savior; pilgrims go to the stores with credit cards, not to the manger with gifts. It is the feast of indulgence, not of the incarnation.”

“to see God solely as love is to overlook the beauty and the purpose of the cross.”

“The reality, though, is that our very best efforts at following his example are always imperfect and defiled by our sinful nature. By contrast, his obedience was always perfect and complete and never defiled. Therefore, we should always look first at what Jesus did as our representative before looking at him as our example.”

“Growth in sanctification will always include a deepening appreciation of the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“To express it in the bold words of Professor Murray: 'sin may be said to have ruled over him [Christ]'. But he broke its dominion, and because we are united to him he has thereby broken its dominion over us.”

“If sin's reign over us is ended, then we must not—indeed cannot—go on living as though we were still its subjects. It now becomes irrational to use the body as if it were still the body in which sin reigned. Since grace now reigns; sin shall not be our master!”

“The real enemy is indwelling sin. And the remedy for sin is neither the law nor its overthrow. It is grace, as Paul had so wonderfully exhibited in Romans 5:12–21, and that grace set in the context of his exposition of union with Christ in Romans 6:1–14.”

“And he watched over me before I knew him, and before I learned sense or even distinguished between good and evil, and he protected me, and consoled me as a father would his son. Therefore, indeed, I cannot keep silent, nor would it be proper, so many favours and graces has the Lord deigned to bestow on me in the land of my captivity.”

“The Church’s Confession of Faith remained unaltered. But it would be naïve scholarship that extrapolated from what was professed to what was preached and indeed from what was preached to what was possessed. Every pastor should know this and therefore should never assume that everyone listening to him has been gripped by the wonder of God’s grace—even if they have confessed the church’s creed.”

“pastors need themselves to have been mastered by the unconditional grace of God. From them the vestiges of a self-defensive pharisaism and conditionalism need to be torn. Like the Savior they need to handle bruised reeds without breaking them and dimly burning wicks without quenching them.”

“What is a godly pastor, after all, but one who is like God, with a heart of grace; someone who sees God bringing prodigals home and runs to embrace them, weeps for joy that they have been brought home, and kisses them—asking no questions—no qualifications or conditions required?”

“When the benefits are seen as abstractable from the Benefactor the issue becomes: 1) For the preacher: “How can I offer these benefits?” and 2) For the hearer: “How can I get these benefits into my life?” But when it is seen that Christ and his benefits are inseparable and that the latter are not abstractable commodities, the primary question becomes: 1) For the preacher: “How do I preach Christ himself?” and 2) For the hearer: “How do I get into Christ?”

“Matthew 22:4 (“Everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast”), he addresses the issue of “those to whom the offer is made”: It is not one or two, or some few that are called, not the great only, nor the small only, not the holy only, nor the profane only, but ye are all bidden; the call comes to all and every one of you in particular, poor and rich, high and low, holy and profane. Then Durham continues: We make this offer to all of you, to you who are Atheists, to you that are Graceless, to you that are Ignorant, to you that are Hypocrites, to you that are Lazy and Lukewarm, to the civil and to the profane, we pray, we beseech, we obtest you all to come to the wedding; Call (saith the Lord) the blind, the maimed, the halt, &c and bid them all come, yea, compel them to come in. Grace can do more and greater wonders than to call such; it can not only make the offer of marriage to them, but it can make up the match effectually betwixt Christ and them. We will not, we dare not say, that all of you will get Christ for a Husband; but we do most really offer him to you all, and it shall be your own fault if ye want him and go without him. And therefore, before we proceed any further, we do solemnly protest, and before God and his Son Jesus Christ, take instruments this day, that this offer is made to you and that it is told to you in his name, that the Lord Jesus is willing to match with you, even the profanest and most graceless of you, if ye be willing to match with him, and he earnestly invites you to come to the wedding.28”

“This is thought to be Jesus’s best-loved parable, usually because our eyes are on the prodigal and his father. But as with jokes, so with parables: there is a principle in both of “end stress.” The “punch line” comes at the end. That being the case the alarming message here is that the spirit of the elder brother, the legalist, is more likely to be found near the father’s house than in the pig farm—or in concrete terms, in the congregation and among the faithful. And sometimes (only sometimes?), it appears in the pulpit and in the heart of the pastor.”

“This might be illustrated by the way in which, for example, John Owen’s work Of the Mortification of Sin has undoubtedly been read by many more younger ministers than either his Glory of Christ or Communion with God. That may be understandable because of the deep pastoral insight in Owen’s short work; but it may also put the practical cart before the theological horse. Owen himself would not have been satisfied with hearers who learned mortification without learning Christ. A larger paradigmatic shift needs to take place than only exchanging a superficial subjectivism for Owen’s rigorous subjectivism. What is required is a radical recentering in a richer and deeper knowledge of Christ, understood in terms of his person and work. There can be little doubt that Owen himself viewed things this way.”

“In Christ we are no longer dominated by the flesh, but by the Spirit; but we are not yet delivered from the flesh. So long as this eschatological tension exists for the believer, so long will there be—in Calvin’s view—a gap between the definition of faith and the actual experience of the believer:”

“There is a kind of orthodoxy in which the several loci of systematic theology, or stages of redemptive history, are all in place, but that lacks the life of the whole, just as arms, legs, torso, head, feet, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth may all be present—while the body as a whole lacks energy and perhaps life itself. The form of godliness is not the same as its power.”

“The offer of the gospel is to be made not to the righteous or even the repentant, but to all. There are no conditions that need to be met in order for the gospel offer to be made.”

“The Marrow Controversy raised a major question about how the gospel is to be preached. But the answer to that question depends on our answer to a more fundamental one: What is the gospel? Contemporary discussion simply underlines how central this question is and the extent to which the answer we give determines how we preach and communicate the gospel.”