A Call to Spiritual Reformation Quotes

“If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior. ”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“We quickly learn that God is more interested in our holiness than in our comfort. He more greatly delights in the integrity and purity of his church than in the material well-being of its members. He shows himself more clearly to men and women who enjoy him and obey him than to men and women whose horizons revolve around good jobs, nice houses, and reasonable health. He is far more committed to building a corporate “temple” in which his Spirit dwells than he is in preserving our reputations. He is more vitally disposed to display his grace than to flatter our intelligence. He is more concerned for justice than for our ease. He is more deeply committed to stretching our faith than our popularity. He prefers that his people live in disciplined gratitude and holy joy rather than in pushy self-reliance and glitzy happiness. He wants us to pursue daily death, not self-fulfillment, for the latter leads to death, while the former leads to life. These essential values of the gospel must shape our praying, as they shape Paul’s. Indeed, they become the ground for our praying (“For this reason . . . I pray”): it is a wonderful comfort, a marvelous boost to faith, to know that you are praying in line with the declared will of almighty God.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“If we harbor bitterness and resentment, praying is little more than wasted time and effort.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“God’s purpose for the men and women he redeems is not simply to have them believe certain truths but to transform them in a lifelong process that stretches toward heaven.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“we will see profound spiritual renovation if by God’s grace we make it our commitment not to put anyone down—except on our prayer list.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher’s sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity.”
― D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“is it not nevertheless true that by and large we are better at organizing than agonizing? Better at administering than interceding? Better at fellowship than fasting? Better at entertainment than worship? Better at theological articulation than spiritual adoration? Better—God help us!—at preaching than at praying?”
― D.A. Carson, Praying with Paul: A Call to Spiritual Reformation

“On the last day, God will ask, in effect, “What have you done with the salvation I bestowed on you?”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“To put the matter at its most basic, Paul’s prayer is the product of his passion for people. His unaffected fervency in prayer is not whipped-up emotionalism but the overflow of his love for brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. That means that if we are to improve our praying, we must strengthen our loving. As we grow in disciplined, self-sacrificing love, so we will grow in intercessory prayer. Superficially fervent prayers devoid of such love are finally phony, hollow, shallow.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“do not tie your joy, your sense of well-being, to power in ministry. Your ministry can be taken from you. Tie your joy to the fact you are known and loved by God; tie it to your salvation; tie it to the sublime truth that your name is written in heaven.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“In the biblical view of things, a deeper knowledge of God brings with it improvement in the other areas mentioned: purity, integrity, a willingness to sacrifice, evangelistic faithfulness, better study of Scripture, improved private and corporate worship, better relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ, a heart for the lost, and much more. But if we seek these things without passionately desiring a deeper knowledge of God, we may be running after God’s blessings or pursuing God’s power without running after him.”
― D.A. Carson, Praying with Paul: A Call to Spiritual Reformation

“In all our pursuit of excellence, we must never worship excellence. That would simply be idolatrous.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“Not a drop of rain can fall outside the orb of Jesus’ sovereignty. All our days—our health, our illnesses, our joys, our victories, our tears, our prayers, and the answers to our prayers—fall within the sweep of the sovereignty of one who wears a human face, a thorn-shadowed face.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“We need not think that the only sins that will keep us from prayer are large and gross. We so often fall at the subtle points.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“When God finds us so puffed up that we do not feel our need for him, it is an act of kindness on his part to take us down a peg or two; it would be an act of judgment to leave us in our vaulting self-esteem.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“It matters little whether you are the mother of active children who drain away your energy, an important executive in a major multinational corporation, a graduate student cramming for impending comprehensives, a plumber working overtime to put your children through college, or a pastor of a large church putting in ninety-hour weeks: at the end of the day, if you are too busy to pray, you are too busy. Cut something out.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“knowledge of God’s will, knowledge that consists of all spiritual wisdom and understanding, turns in part on obedience, on conformity to the will of God.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“God’s valuation of his people is established by his valuation of Christ.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“It is painfully easy for us to come to all kinds of critical points in ministry, service, family development, changes in vocation, and, precisely because we have enjoyed spiritual victories in the past, approach these matters with sophisticated criteria but without prayer. We love our independence. As a result we may repeatedly stumble and fall, because although we have exercised all our intellectual ingenuity we have not sought God’s face, we have not begged him for his wisdom.”
― D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“Many facets of Christian discipleship, not least prayer, are rather more effectively passed on by modeling than by formal teaching. Good praying is more easily caught than taught. If it is right to say that we should choose models from whom we can learn, then the obverse truth is that we ourselves become responsible to become models for others. So whether you are leading a service or family prayers, whether you are praying in a small-group Bible study or at a convention, work at your public prayers.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“What we actually do reflects our highest priorities. That means we can proclaim our commitment to prayer until the cows come home, but unless we actually pray, our actions disown our words.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“Such dangers aside, you can greatly improve your prayer life if you combine these first two principles: set apart time for praying, and then use practical ways to impede mental drift.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted. So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs - and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfillment. God simply becomes the Great Being, who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“Clearly all of these things are important. I would not want anything I have said to be taken as disparagement of evangelism and worship, a diminishing of the importance of purity and integrity, a carelessness about disciplined Bible study. But there is a sense in which these urgent needs are merely symptomatic of a far more serious lack. The one thing we most urgently need in Western Christendom is a deeper knowledge of God. We need to know God better.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“That is why Samuel Zwemer, groundbreaking missionary to Muslim lands, could utter his famous saying, “Prayer is the gymnasium of the soul.” The idea is not that prayer becomes intrinsically superior and potentially more effective when it is offered up in a frenzy of sweat. Nor is there likely any direct allusion to the account of Jacob wrestling with God (Gen. 32:22–32).2 The idea, rather, is that Paul understands real praying to include an element of struggle, discipline, work, spiritual agonizing against the dark powers of evil. Insofar as the Roman Christians pray this way for Paul, they are joining him in his apostolic struggle.”
― D.A. Carson, Praying with Paul: A Call to Spiritual Reformation

“Those who read Christian biographies know that many men and women of God have reveled in a deep experience of the love of God. It is said that R. A. Torrey earnestly sought God’s face, and one day while he was reading the Scriptures and praying, he was so overwhelmed with a profound consciousness of God’s love for him that he began to weep and weep. Eventually he asked God to show him no more: he could not bear it.”
― D.A. Carson, Praying with Paul: A Call to Spiritual Reformation

“God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions in Scripture to reduce human responsibility. Human beings are responsible creatures—that is, they choose, they believe, they disobey, they respond, and there is moral significance in their choices; however, human responsibility never functions in Scripture to diminish God’s sovereignty or to make God absolutely contingent.”
― D.A. Carson, Praying with Paul: A Call to Spiritual Reformation