Inspirational Quotes by Sinclair B. Ferguson
“But, as Paul is at pains to stress, the law is good, and just, and holy.50 And we need to understand, sense, feel, and then delight in the grace of law.51 For unless we are persuaded that God has shown his grace in his law as well as in his Son, all we will hear and see at Sinai is thunder and lightning.”
“Repentance then is not the punctiliar decision of a moment but a radical heart transformation that reverses the whole direction of life.”
“Thus it is understanding God’s grace—that is to say, understanding God himself 178—that demolishes legalism. Grace highlights legalism’s bankruptcy and shows that it is not only useless; it is pointless; its life breath is smothered out of it.”
“Repentance unto life is an evangelical grace. . . . By it a sinner, out of the sight and sense of the odiousness of sin, not only of its danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness of his sins, as contrary to the holy nature and righteous law of God, and upon the apprehension of his mercy in Christ to such as are penitent, so grieves for and hates his sins as to turn from them all unto God, purposing and endeavoring to walk with him in all the ways of his commandments.10”
“There are places in our quest for understanding where we reach the limits of the human mind. The finite does not have the capacity fully to grasp and understand the infinite. But it is how we respond just at this point that is significant. Do we say with Nietzsche, “But to reveal my entire heart to you, my friends, if there were gods, how could I stand not to be a god! Therefore, there are no gods.”15 Or do we bow down, “lost in wonder, love, and praise,”16 because we recognize we have come to the horizon of human understanding and can only gaze in awe at the God who is so infinitely great and glorious—and who loves and cares for us?”
“And, with a disregard for other things, he cherished and experienced That blessed communion with God about which he wrote.”
“To become a Christian believer is to be brought into a reality far grander than anything we could ever have imagined. It means communion with the triune God.”
“Repentance is suffused with faith; otherwise it is legal. But then without repentance, faith would be no more than imagination.”
“At the end of the day we cannot divide faith and repentance chronologically. The true Christian believes penitently, and he repents believingly.”
“To run, to work, the law commands, The gospel gives me feet and hands. The one requires that I obey, The other does the power convey.”
“Antinomianism may be couched in doctrinal and theological terms, but it both betrays and masks the heart’s distaste for absolute divine obligation, or duty. That”
“For whenever we make the warrant to believe in Christ to any degree dependent upon our subjective condition, we distort it. 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.”
“Then all my servile works were done A righteousness to raise; Now, freely chosen in the Son, I freely choose his ways.”
“salvation becomes ours in Christ and not merely through Christ.”
“By way of contrast he wanted to stress that the gospel’s center is found in Jesus Christ himself, who has been crucified for sin and raised for justification, with the inbuilt implication that Christ himself thus defined and described should be proclaimed as able to save all who come to him.”
“You must first have Christ himself, before you can partake of those benefits by him.19”
“Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.”
“Pharisees lived “according to the strictest party of . . . religion.”3 The name itself is probably derived from the root “to separate.” Pharisaism was essentially a conservative “holiness movement.” So”
“This is the key to the enjoyment of assurance precisely because assurance is our assurance that he is a great Savior and that he is ours.”
“But it is serpentine logic, for it simply compounds the old legal spirit. It is the natural instinct of the once-antinomian prodigal who, when awakened, thinks in terms of working his way back into the favor of his father.38”
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Sinclair Ferguson is a Scottish theologian known in Reformed Christian circles for his teaching, writing, and editorial work. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen and was a minister in the Church of Scotland from 1971 to 2005, when he transferred to the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, serving as the Senior Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Columbia, South Carolina. He has served as an editor with the Banner of Truth Trust, worked as a minister at St George's-Tron Church, Glasgow, and a Council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.
Ferguson is the Senior Minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina. He is also a Professor of Systematic Theology at Redeemer Seminary in Dallas, prior to which he held the Charles Krahe Chair for Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is also a council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.
Ferguson speaks at numerous conferences worldwide, and has written many books.