Quotes from Sinclair B. Ferguson

God has chosen us. Our status is not a matter of our worthiness, but of His love.

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.

The foundation of worship in the heart is not emotional...it is theological.

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!

As the early church fathers delighted in saying, Christ took what was ours so that we might receive what was His.

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

The benefits of the gospel are in Christ. They do not exist apart from him. They are ours only in him. They cannot be abstracted from him as if we ourselves could possess them independently of him.

Here are wonders upon wonders: the Strong One is weak; the Infinite One lies in a manger; the Prince of Life dies; the Crucified One lives; the Humiliated One is glorified. Meekness and majesty, indeed! Behold, then, your newborn King! Come and worship Him!

God protects us from Satan even at times when we are not aware of His protection. But how can we develop Jesus-like discernment? By Spirit-aided digestion of the solid food of God's wisdom.

When we see salvation whole—its every single part is found in Christ, we must beware lest we derive the smallest drop from somewhere else.

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

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?

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.

Third, hear our loss of focus on the gospel in our songs. This is no comment on musical styles and tastes, but simply an observation about the lyrical content of much that is being sung in churches today. In many cases, congregations unwittingly have begun to sing about themselves and how they are feeling rather than about God and His glory.

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!

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.

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.

That life begins with God's working, not with our "doing.

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

Living in the Spirit means a daily commitment to please Christ and not to please self.

I am not asking you to do that because the tree is ugly—actually it is just as attractive as the other trees. I don't create ugly, ever!11 You won't be able to look at the fruit and think, That must taste horrible. It is a fine-looking tree. So it's simple. Trust me, obey me, and love me because of who I am and because you are enjoying what I have given to you. Trust me, obey me, and you will grow.

Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.

Marriage, and the process of coming to it, is not heaven! It is the bonding together of two needy sinners in order to make a partnership which is substantially greater than either of them alone.

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