“We should not ask, ‘What is wrong with the world?’ for that diagnosis has already been given. Rather we should ask, ‘What has happened to salt and light?’”1
“A Christian should resemble a fruit tree with real fruit, not a Christmas tree with decorations tied on.”
“God intends us to penetrate the world. Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad. And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves? One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad. It cannot do anything else. The real question to ask is: Where is the salt?”
“Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.”
“We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.”
“Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and checkered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture.”
“Greatness in the kingdom of God is measured in terms of obedience.”
“Christians who neglect the Bible simply do not mature.”
“It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.”
“Do not be content with a static Christian life. Determine rather to grow in faith and love, in knowledge and holiness.”
“As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.”
“Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony.”
“A man who loves his wife will love her letters and her photographs because they speak to him of her. So if we love the Lord Jesus, we shall love the Bible because it speaks to us of him.”
“No man preaches his sermon well to others if he does not first preach it to his own heart.”
“We should travel light and live simply. Our enemy is not possessions but excess.”
“What we need is not more learning, not more eloquence, not more persuasion, not more organization, but more power from the Holy Spirit.”
“Prayer is the very way God Himself has chosen for us to express our conscious need of Him and our humble dependence on Him.”
“The cross is not just a badge to identify us…it is also the compass which gives us our bearings in a disoriented world.”
“The gospel is NOT preached if Christ is not preached.”
“Scripture is the royal scepter by which King Jesus rules his church.”
“We do not need to wait for the Holy Spirit to come: he came on the day of Pentecost. He has never left the church.”
“The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought.”
“…The first and great evidence of our walking by the Spirit or being filled with the Spirit is not some private mystical experience of our own, but our practical relationships of love with other people.”
1 All of these quotes are from the website below:
TOP 25 QUOTES BY JOHN STOTT (of 160) | A-Z Quotes (azquotes.com)