The Cross and Christian Ministry Quotes

“The only thing of transcendent importance to human beings is the knowledge of God. This knowledge does not belong to those who endlessly focus on themselves. Those who truly come to know God delight just to know him. He becomes their center. They think of him, delight in him, boast of him.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“The gospel of the crucified Messiah must transform not only our beliefs but our behavior.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“It is the truth and power of the gospel that must change people’s lives, not the glamour of our oratory or the emotional power of our stories.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“Our self-centeredness is deep. It is so brutally idolatrous that it tries to domesticate God himself. In our desperate folly we act as if we can outsmart God, as if he owes us explanations, as if we are wise and self-determining while he exists only to meet our needs.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“The heart of our lostness is our profound self-focus. We do not want to know him, if knowing him is on his terms. We are happy to have a god we can more or less manipulate; we do not want a god to whom we admit that we are rebels in heart and mind, that we do not deserve his favor, and that our only hope is in his pardoning and transforming grace.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“Focus on Christ crucified. That is what Paul did: “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2). This does not mean that this was a new departure for Paul, still less that Paul was devoted to blissful ignorance of anything and everything other than the cross. No, what he means is that all he does and teaches is tied to the cross. He cannot long talk about Christian joy, or Christian ethics, or Christian fellowship, or the Christian doctrine of God, or anything else, without finally tying it to the cross. Paul is gospel-centered; he is cross-centered. That”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“In the first place, Paul says, the utter bankruptcy of all the world’s efforts to know God was part of God’s wise design. It was “in the wisdom of God” that “the world through its wisdom did not know him” (1:21). Not only did the wise and the scholars and the philosophers fail to understand, God in his all-wise providence actually worked it out that way. Their failures are thoroughly blameworthy; their ignorance of God and their endless, self-centered preoccupation are culpable. Nevertheless, no evil, certainly not theirs, can escape the bounds of God’s sovereign providence—and it is God himself who ensures that the world in its wisdom does not know him.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“The cross not only establishes what we are to preach, but how we are to preach. It prescribes what Christian leaders must be and how Christians must view Christian leaders. It tells us how to serve and draws us onward in discipleship until we understand what it means to be world Christians. The”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“Faithful Christian leaders must make the connections between creed and conduct, between the cross and how to live. And they must exemplify this union in their own lives. In”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“At heart, therefore, they really have grasped the message of Christ crucified, even if they have not brought their lives into conformity with this message.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“For the better we know God, the more we will want all of our existence to revolve around him,”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“Since then, I have learned that reverse culture shock is the worst culture shock. Many people who go abroad for a few years brace themselves to handle the new culture; they almost never brace themselves to handle the jarring impact of reentry into the culture they have left behind.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“It took me almost six months before I could look at myself in the mirror and give myself a good scolding. “Carson, you hypocritical idiot. If the Lord called you to Jamaica or Japan, to Mauritius or Mombasa, you would cope. You would discipline yourself to understand the culture and the people and would learn to minister within that framework. Are you so arrogant that you cannot make the same adjustments when you return to your own people? Can you not see that it is not they who have changed, but you? Do you despise them because they have not enjoyed the breadth of cultural exposure in different countries that you have experienced?” So in the Lord’s mercy, I finally settled down.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“The pace of change is so fast that different generations are clashing with each other almost like competing cultures. For example, the radically different tastes in music that divide many congregations at the moment are, in part, culture clashes. And it is not easy to be wise. Some wag has said that the last seven words of the church will be, “We’ve always done it this way before.” On the other hand, I have some sympathy for the position of C. S. Lewis, who maintained that he could put up with almost any pattern of corporate worship, so long as it did not change too often. His point is that mere novelty is in fact distracting. The deepest and best corporate worship takes place when the forms are so familiar you never see them and can penetrate the reality.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“We fight to protect our rights. But I suspect that some of the most trying tests of our preparedness to give up our rights occur when we are thrust into multicultural circumstances for a while. Little things can prove very irritating. When I have chaired seminars that include Christian thinkers from around the world, not a little of my energy has been devoted to trying to read the different cultural signals. From the moment participants first enter the room, the cultural differences are apparent. Our Italian colleague arrives, and there are kisses all around. A German shows up, and he has to shake everyone’s hand. Some people are comfortable standing about eighteen inches from you when you converse together; others, like the British scholar, prefer something closer to a yard. The close-talkers appear pushy and rude; the scholar, who is constantly backing up, looks like he’s distant and unfriendly. The Japanese attendees enter and bow. An American member saunters in and remarks loudly, “Hi, everybody. Sorry I’m late!” He is late—by about ten minutes. But he will not understand what “late” really looks like until our colleague from Nigeria arrives.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“The resurrected Jesus appeared to him in brilliant light on the Damascus road and effected his salvation and his call to ministry in one searing revelation. Paul cannot abandon his preaching without abandoning his salvation; to him, the two are of a piece.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“First, the kind of situation Paul is facing here must not be confused with quite a different one. Suppose you are a Christian who, owing to your cultural background, has always engaged in social drinking. Now you move into a circle that is more socially conservative. Some senior saint comes up to you and says, “I have to tell you that I am offended by your drinking. Paul tells us that if anyone is offended by what you do, you must stop it. I’m offended; you must therefore stop your drinking.” How would you respond? This senior saint is simply manipulating you. He (or she) is not a person with a weak conscience who is in danger of tippling on the side because of your example, and thus wounding his weak conscience. Far from it. If he sees you drinking again he will likely denounce you in the most unrestrained terms. In his eyes, he is the stronger person, not the weaker. In other words, this case is not at all like the one the apostle had to deal with. Indeed, it might be wise to tell him, “I’m sorry to hear that you have such a weak conscience.” He will probably be so unclear as to what you mean that he may actually leave you alone for a couple of weeks.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“Still, whatever he means by saying he is not free from God’s law, there is something intuitively obvious about it. We can easily hear Paul saying, “To the Jew I became a Jew,” and “To the Gentile I became a Gentile”; we cannot imagine him saying, “To the gossip I became a gossip,” and “To the adulterer I became an adulterer.” In other words, while saying he is not under the law as other Jews were, he certainly does not mean to suggest he is an utter antinomian (someone who feels completely free from all of God’s demands and commands).”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“Almost in reaction against such globalization, many people are responding with increasing nationalism, sometimes with almost frightening ethnocentrism. Christians are not immune to these sweeping currents of thought. They, too, can be caught up in flag-waving nationalism that puts the interests of my nation or my class or my race or my tribe or my heritage above the demands of the kingdom of God.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“We must frankly recognize that this stance is alien to much of our experience in the Western world. Until fairly recently, even the unconverted in the West largely adhered to Judeo-Christian values. However, that consensus is eroding rapidly, and as it does there will be more and more overt opposition to any form of Christianity that tries to maintain allegiance to the Bible.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“Clearly the Corinthians adopted their own form of this over-realized eschatology. It was tied to their pride, their endless one-upmanship.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“So in one sense Christians are oriented to the future and are awaiting the kingdom. This stance we may designate futurist eschatology. In another sense, Christians have already been transferred out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of God’s Son. We are already in the kingdom. This stance is sometimes referred to as realized or inaugurated eschatology.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“How wonderful! The King of the universe, the Sovereign who has endured our endless rebellion and sought us out at the cost of his Son’s death, climaxes our redemption by praising us!”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“But it does mean that if you are, say, a Lutheran, you must not cut yourself off from what is right and good in the Wesleyan, Reformed, charismatic, Anabaptist, and other lines. (And of course, I could have rephrased that sentence in any combination.)”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“It is possible so to lionize some Christian leader that we start making excuses for his or her serious, perhaps even catastrophic, faults. What we must remember is that the leaders are no more than servants.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“That God’s grace empowers our works destroys all mechanical merit theology: so much work, so much pay. At the end of the day, we work and serve with the end in view and constantly remember that if we are fruitful it is because God’s grace is at work within us.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“This means that the sophisticated form of the “carnal Christian” theory, which postulates that some people make a profession of faith, shortly thereafter return to a lifestyle indistinguishable from that of any unbeliever, yet finally make it into heaven by the skin of their teeth (“as one escaping through the flames”), finds no warrant whatever in this passage. Even the “worldly” or “carnal” Christian is still identifiably a Christian, and in this passage it is the church builders who barely escape the flames, not the “ordinary” church folk themselves.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“This fire, then, is not purgatory. Nothing is said about tormenting the builders and purging them in the flames. Rather, it is the quality of their work that is revealed by the fire. If a builder’s work is burned up, “he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames” (3:15).”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“this also means that Christian leaders should refrain from presenting themselves as if they had the corner on the truth, or all the gifts, or exclusive authority or insight. We are all “only servants.” We are “fellow workers,” and we are God’s.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians

“No Christian leader is to be venerated or listened to or adulated with the kind of allegiance and devotion properly reserved for God alone. That is folly; it betrays a deep ignorance of the nature of true Christian leadership and of the corporate and mutually supportive ways in which Christian leaders complement one another’s work under God.”
― D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians