Basic Christianity Quotes

“Jesus never concealed the fact that his religion included a demand as well as an offer. Indeed, the demand was as total as the offer was free. If he offered men his salvation, he also demanded their submission. He gave no encouragement whatever to thoughtless applicants for discipleship. He brought no pressure to bear on any inquirer. He sent irresponsible enthusiasts away empty. Luke tells of three men who either volunteered, or were invited, to follow Jesus; but no one passed the Lord’s test. The rich young ruler, too, moral, earnest and attractive, who wanted eternal life on his own terms, went away sorrowful, with his riches intact but with neither life nor Christ as his possession…The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict, half built towers—the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so called “nominal Christianity.” In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved, enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism…The message of Jesus was very different. He never lowered his standards or modified his conditions to make his call more readily acceptable. He asked his first disciples, and he has asked every disciple since, to give him their thoughtful and total commitment. Nothing less than this will do”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Many people visualize a God who sits comfortably on a distant throne, remote, aloof, uninterested, and indifferent to the needs of mortals, until, it may be, they can badger him into taking action on their behalf. Such a view is wholly false. The Bible reveals a God who, long before it even occurs to man to turn to him, while man is still lost in darkness and sunk in sin, takes the initiative, rises from his throne, lays aside his glory, and stoops to seek until he finds him.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“The astonishing paradox of Christ's teaching and of Christian experience is this: if we lose ourselves in following Christ, we actually find ourselves. True self-denial is self-discovery. To live for ourselves is insanity and suicide; to live for God and for man is wisdom and life indeed. We do not begin to find ourselves until we have become willing to lose ourselves in the service of Christ and of our fellows.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“The Bible isn’t about people trying to discover God, but about God reaching out to find us.”
― John Stott, Basic Christianity

“It is now time for us to ask the personal question put to Jesus Christ by Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road, ‘What shall I do Lord?’ or the similar question asked by the Philippian jailer, ’What must I do to be saved?’ Clearly we must do something. Christianity is no mere passive acquiescence in a series of propositions, however true. We may believe in the deity and the salvation of Christ, and acknowledge ourselves to be sinners in need of his salvation, but this does not make us Christians. We have to make a personal response to Jesus Christ, committing ourselves unreservedly to him as our Savior and Lord … At its simplest Christ’s call was “Follow me.” He asked men and women for their personal allegiance. He invited them to learn from him, to obey his words and to identify themselves with his cause … Now there can be no following without a previous forsaking. To follow Christ is to renounce all lesser loyalties … let me be more explicit about the forsaking which cannot be separated from the following of Jesus Christ. First, there must be a renunciation of sin. This, in a word, is repentance. It is the first part of Christian conversion. It can in no circumstances be bypassed. Repentance and faith belong together. We cannot follow Christ without forsaking sin … Repentance is a definite turn from every thought, word, deed, and habit which is known to be wrong … There can be no compromise here. There may be sins in our lives which we do not think we could ever renounce, but we must be willing to let them go as we cry to God for deliverance from them. If you are in doubt regarding what is right and what is wrong, do not be too greatly influenced by the customs and conventions of Christians you may know. Go by the clear teaching of the Bible and by the prompting of your conscience, and Christ will gradually lead you further along the path of righteousness. When he puts his finger on anything, give it up. It may be some association or recreation, some literature we read, or some attitude of pride, jealousy or resentment, or an unforgiving spirit. Jesus told his followers to pluck out their eye and cut off their hand or foot if it caused them to sin. We are not to obey this with dead literalism, of course, and mutilate our bodies. It is a figure of speech for dealing ruthlessly with the avenues along which temptation comes to us.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“The Christian message has a moral challenge. If the message is true, the moral challenge has to be accepted. So God is not a fit object for man’s detached scrutiny. You cannot fix God at the end of a telescope or a microscope and say “How interesting!” God is not interesting. He is deeply upsetting. The same is true of Jesus Christ … We know that to find God and to accept Jesus Christ would be a very inconvenient experience. It would involve the rethinking of our whole outlook on life and the readjustment of our whole manner of life. And it is a combination of intellectual and moral cowardice which makes us hesitate. We do not find because we do not seek. We do not seek because we do not want to find, and we know that the way to be certain of not finding is not to seek … Christ’s promise is plain: "Seek and you will find.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Your call is clear, cold centuries across;
You bid me follow you, and take my cross,
And daily lose myself, myself deny,
And stern against myself shout ‘Crucify’.

My stubborn nature rises to rebel
Against your call. Proud choruses of hell
Unite to magnify my restless hate
Of servitude, lest I capitulate.

The world, to see my cross, would pause and jeer.
I have no choice, but still to persevere
To save myself – and follow you from far,
More slow than Magi-for I have no star.

And yet you call me still. Your cross
Eclipses mine, transforms the bitter loss
I thought that I would suffer if I came
To you- into immeasurable gain.

I kneel before you, Jesus, crucified,
My cross is shouldered and my self denied;
I’ll follow daily, closely, not refuse
For love of you and man myself to lose.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Christianity is not just about what we believe; it’s also about how we behave.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Christianity is a religion of salvation, and the fact is that there is nothing in any of the non-Christian religions to compare with this message of a God who loved, and came after, and died for, a world of lost sinners.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“I remember a young man coming to see me when he had just left school and begun work in London. He had given up going to church, he said, because he could not say the creed without feeling that he was a hypocrite. He no longer believed it. When he had finished telling me what he thought, I said to him, ‘If I were to answer your problems to your complete intellectual satisfaction, would you be willing to change the way you live?’ He smiled slightly and blushed. The answer was clearly ‘No’. His real problem was not intellectual but moral. This, then, is the spirit in which our search must be conducted. We must set aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God – no matter what the consequences. Of all these hindrances to the search for truth, the last two are the hardest to overcome: intellectual prejudice and moral self-will. The reason is that both are expressions of fear – and fear is the greatest enemy of the truth.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“The point is that we can never take God by surprise. We can never anticipate him. He always makes the first move. He is always there ‘in the beginning’.”
― John Stott, Basic Christianity

“God. Our highest destiny is to know God, to be in personal relationship with him. Our chief claim to nobility as human beings is that we were made in the image of God and are therefore capable of knowing him.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Christ’s fourth indirect claim was to judge the world. This is perhaps the most fantastic of all his statements. Several of his parables imply that he will come back at the end of the world, and that the final day of reckoning will be postponed until his return. He will himself arouse the dead, and all the nations will be gathered before him. He will sit on the throne of his glory, and the judgment will be committed to him by the Father. He will then separate men from one another as a shepherd separates his sheep from his goats. Some will be invited to come and inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world. Others will hear the dreadful words, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' Not only will Jesus be the judge, but the criterion of judgment will be men’s attitude to him as shown in their treatment of his 'brethren' or their response to his word. Those who have acknowledged him before men he will acknowledge before his Father: those who have denied him, he will deny. Indeed, for a man to be excluded from heaven on the last day, it will be enough for Jesus to say, "I never knew you.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“What then must we do? We must commit ourselves, heart and mind, soul and will, home and life, personally and unreservedly to Jesus Christ. We must humble ourselves before him. We must trust in him as our Saviour and submit to him as our Lord; and then go on to take our place as loyal members of the church and responsible citizens in the community.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“For our sake, he made him sin who knew no sin, so that in him we may become righteousness of God...

As we look at the cross, we begin to understand the terrible implication of these words. At twelve noon, 'there was darkness over the whole land' which continued for three hours until Jesus died. With the darkness came silence, for no eye should see, and no lips could tell, the agony of the soul which the spotless Lamb of God now endured. The accumulated sins of all human history were laid upon him. Voluntarily he bore them in his own body. He made them his own. He shouldered full responsibility for them.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“We must trust in him as our Saviour and submit to him as our Lord; and then go on to take our place as loyal members of the church and responsible citizens in the community.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“God has little patience with triflers; ‘he rewards those who seek him’.7”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“All students know the dangers of approaching their subject with preconceived ideas. Yet many would-be enquirers come to the Bible with their minds already made up.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“We must freely admit that our minds, being finite, cannot possibly discover God by their own efforts. We depend on God to make himself known. I am not saying that we should suspend rational thinking. On the contrary, the psalmist encourages us not to be ‘like the horse or the mule which have no understanding’. We must use our minds; but we must also admit their limitations”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“And that is how it would have stayed, had God not taken the initiative to help us. We would have remained forever agnostic, asking – just like Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus – ‘What is truth?’ but never staying for an answer, never daring to hope that we would receive one. We would be those who worship, for it is part of human nature to worship someone or something, but all our altars would be like the one the apostle Paul found in Athens, dedicated ‘To an unknown god’.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“And self-sacrifice is what the Bible means by 'love.' While sin is possessive, love is expansive. Sin's characteristic is the desire to get; love's characteristic is the desire to give.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“What man needs is a radical change of nature, what Professor H. M. Gwatkin called ‘a change from self to unself’. We cannot do this for ourselves any more than patients needing surgery can perform their own operations.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Such a man is altogether beyond our reach. He succeeded where we always fail. He had complete self-mastery. He never retaliated. He never grew resentful or irritable. He had such control of himself that, whatever others might think or say or do, he would deny himself and abandon himself to the will of God and the welfare of his fellow human beings. ‘I seek not to please myself,’ he said, and ‘I am not seeking glory for myself.’ As Paul wrote, ‘For Christ did not please himself.’ This utter disregard of self in the service of God and man is what the Bible calls love. There is no self-interest in love. The essence of love is self-sacrifice. Even the worst of us is adorned by an occasional flash of such nobility, but the life of Jesus radiated it with a never-fading incandescent glow. Jesus was sinless because he was selfless. Such selflessness is love. And God is love.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.’ This situation is tragic beyond words. We are missing the destiny for which God made us.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“28”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“All true worship is a response to the self-revelation of God in Christ and Scripture, and arises from our reflection on who He is and what He has done…The worship of God is evoked, informed, and inspired by the vision of God…The true knowledge of God will always lead us to worship.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“There are other forms of service which equally deserve the job description ‘Christian ministry’. For example, the calling of many girls to be wife, mother and home-maker is in the fullest sense ‘Christian ministry’, since she is serving Christ, her family and the community. So is every form of work — medicine, research, the law, education, social service, central and local government, industry, business and trade — in which the worker sees himself as cooperating with God in the service of man.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“But when we enquire into what lies beyond the observable universe, when we seek to reflect on the metaphysical, there is no data for us to make use of. We cannot touch, see or hear God directly. Yet the Christian faith is based on the assertion that there once was a time when he chose to speak, and to clothe himself with a body which could be seen and touched. So in the New Testament, John began his first letter with the claim, ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched...we proclaim to you...”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“The point is that we cannot treat God as if he were an object for our detached scrutiny. We cannot fix him at the end of a telescope or a microscope and say, ‘How interesting!’ God is far from being merely interesting. He is deeply upsetting”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Man is as lazy as he dares to be,’ as the American writer Emerson put it. But what we’re dealing with is so important that we must overcome our natural laziness and apathy and give our minds to the search.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity