Quotes from Sinclair B. Ferguson

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

Faithfulness is far more significant than fame when Jesus is building His church.

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.

What the prophets of God did spiritually, the Prophet of God did quite literally and physically.

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.

Faithful service is often unnoticed by men but it never remains unnoticed by God.

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.

True Christian liberty, unlike the various freedom or liberation movements of the secular world, is not a matter of demanding the rights we have.

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

But the truth is that while they may be more dramatic, ours are no less supernatural, for the same Lord sovereignly designed the events that also led us to faith. It was he who placed us in a Christian family, or brought us into contact with a Christian, or stirred up in us an unaccountable desire to read

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

The Father of Glory does not lurk behind His Son with sinister intent to do us ill, restrained only by the cruel and bloody sacrifice His Son has made! No, a thousand times no! The Father loves us in the love of the Son and the love of the Spirit (John 16:27).

These considerations give us some clues as to why legalism and antinomianism are, in fact, nonidentical twins that emerge from the same womb. Eve

God sees as clearly in the dark as in the day; he knows what he is doing and where he is going. He can even weave the dark threads of man's evil deeds, tragedies, and disasters into his purposes and use them for his glory.

Sus obras, todas son señales de ello. Estamos lejos de ser intelectual o personalmente objetivos, o indiferentes, sobre Dios. Debajo de todo, nos oponemos a Él de forma emocional e intelectual; si no fuera así, ¿por qué tanto resentimiento?

Church history helps to illuminate and clarify what we believe, providing a context for evaluating our beliefs and practices, according to the teaching of the church of all the ages.

If the benefits of Christ's work (justification, reconciliation, adoption, and so on) are abstracted from Christ himself, and the proclamation of the gospel is made in terms of what it offers rather than in terms of Christ himself, the question naturally arises: To whom can I offer these benefits?