Mark dever quotes

I love Iain Murray's definition of worldliness: towards the end of Evangelicalism Divided, he says that worldliness consists of loving idols and being at war with God. I think that's true in the lives of too many professing Christians today.

Sometimes we have to wait a long time to see conversions.

I know a girl who has become a really enthusiastic Christian. I remember meeting her several years ago. She lived in a house near us. She was standing out the front smoking, not apparently interested in religious things, but she did have a respect for spiritual matters when I spoke to her. So as we talked, she expressed an interest, and began to come to church occasionally. Over the years, I have watched her come to Christ, be converted, baptized and changed in wonderful ways. It's a real joy to me when I see things like this.

There is no gospel without the offence. This is God's wisdom. It never seems sensible to us in our flesh.

The gospel of Christ has never needed the gimmicks of man to effect conversion in the soul

Friend, the church finds its life as it listens to the Word of God. It finds its purpose as it lives out and displays the Word of God. The church’s job is to listen and then to echo.

The church is the gospel made visible.

Suffering can serve us. Suffering tests our trust in God's promises. And we have a great interest in knowing the truth about our trust in Him.

To evangelize properly by delivering the gospel, we need to follow God's agenda.

If you have no interest in actually committing yourself to an actual group of gospel-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, you might question whether you belong to the body of Christ at all!

A healthy church is not a church that's perfect and without sin. It has not figured everything out. Rather, it's a church that continually strives to take God's side in the battle against the ungodly desires and deceits of the world, our flesh, and the devil. It's a church that continually seeks to conform itself to God's Word.

Christian proclamation might make the gospel audible, but Christians living together in local congregations make the gospel visible (see John 13:34-35). The church is the gospel made visible.

When a person becomes a Christian, he doesn’t just join a local church because it’s a good habit for growing in spiritual maturity. He joins a local church because it’s the expression of what Christ has made him—a member of the body of Christ.

Our fears lie to us about how important they are.

We are all called to initiate involvement in each other’s lives... We covenant together to work and pray for unity, to walk together in love, to exercise care and watchfulness over each other, to faithfully admonish and entreat one another as occasion may require, to assemble together, to pray for each other, to rejoice and to bear with each other, and to pray for God’s help in all this.

Advice on evangelism needs to be tailored to individual situations. For instance, I know someone who needs to be encouraged to speak less and work more. That would be a better testimony for him because he has certainly let his work colleagues know about Jesus. It's not that I don't want him to witness about Jesus, but I have a lot of sympathy for his employer. He is paying for work to be done.

We may be sinking in the North Atlantic in the most famous ship disaster of all time, but God can still use us to reach out and save others through our witness.

I think that there are many things in the New Testament that show us that the godliness of our conversation plays an important evangelistic role. The apostles are clear that we mustn't limit the explicit sharing of the gospel to formal preaching. It can also happen in ordinary conversations.

It's fine to deal with people's doubts and explain why they have good reasons to believe in Christ. But until we tell them the good news of Jesus Christ, we haven't done our job. They need a saviour that God has provided them in Christ. Once they know that, we can do as much apologetics as we need to.

If we feel that our ministry has come to an end in one place, then it seems reasonable to move on.

All evangelists want to do is share a message about the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. But our world is confused by the confidence we have in the gospel, and is threatened by it. Satan, I am sure, causes those things to echo in the world to increase this sort of common confusion.

Let's say you don't want to stress the urgency of the gospel. Imagine that you are a hyper-Calvinist, and you just figure that people's salvation is a matter for the sovereignty of God. Well, if that's the case, there will never be the heartfelt pleading that you would see in a Spurgeon or an Edwards, or in the Apostle Paul where he pours out his heart in Romans 9 and 10 for the Jewish people.

Our culture is becoming more hostile to the gospel. This trend may be more established in Australia than in the USA, but it's now certainly the case that the postmodern mindset is dominant, particularly in the media. Therefore, when we start speaking in terms of certainties, we sound scary to other people.

Most people are glad for somebody else to share their own story of how they have found spiritual help. The problems start when you begin to universalize your story - when your narrative becomes authoritative and begins affecting their lives as well.

T]he church is not a place. It's not a building. It's not a preaching point. It's not a spiritual service provider. It's a people - the new covenant, blood-bought people of God. That's why Paul said, 'Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her' (Eph. 5:25). He didn't give himself up for a place, but for a people.

There are times when the gospel just seems to be powerfully at work in a nation, and thousands upon thousands are converted. If you think about what has happened in Latin America, Africa and East Asia all in the last hundred years, it is breathtaking. We have seen an expansion of the gospel as we have never seen before in the history of the church.

I think that honesty in presenting the gospel goes out the window when you want people to respond to the message, but you are prepared to accept any sort of response. Of course, the only true response is heartfelt repentance and faith. However, if you don't feel the need to be honest in your presentation, then you will calibrate your presentation of the gospel to whatever gets the response you want.

Avoiding the doctrine of Hell is one step away from denying it altogether.

Unbelief is like gravity, it's always pulling down on the authority of Scripture.

I guess I tend to see divine appointments everywhere. I am always on the alert for opportunities. So I prefer to err on the side of witnessing too often than not enough.

The truly changed, truly converted, truly Christian heart can say with John Newton, “I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I wish to be. I am not what I hope to be. Yet I can truly say, I am not what I once was. By the grace of God, I am what I am.

I'll tell you what's more important than all the commentaries in your library: prayer.

We are called to love others. We share the gospel because we love people. And we don't share the gospel because we don't love people. Instead, we wrongly fear them. We don't want to cause awkwardness. We want their respect, and after all, we figure, if we try to share the gospel with them, we'll look foolish! And so we are quiet. We protect our pride at the cost of their souls. In the name of not wanting to look weird, we are content to be complicit in their being lost.

I don't have any way to control the Spirit or create revival. I pray that the Holy Spirit would move upon the church, but at the same time, I want to busy evangelizing. I am not one of those people who moan and pray for revival all the time, but do nothing.

Some believers are faithful in the way that they live, but at the end of the day, they will not share the gospel with as many people as someone else who has special gifts from God.

Evangelists have absolutely no desire to physically or emotionally coerce anyone. In a sense, we are like doctors: we have a duty to tell you the truth, care for you, argue with you (if that is useful), but we can't compel you to do anything.

Your plans are fine, as long as you realize God has the right to change them.

As long as quick numerical growth remains the primary indicator of church health, the truth will be compromised. Instead, churches must once again begin measuring success not in terms of numbers but in terms of fidelity to the Scriptures.

The important thing when you are tied down is to continue to model Christ's love. This will ensure that your words, perhaps spoken long ago, will have fresh relevance, or it will help little ones to understand what it means to live the Christian life in days to come. A life well-lived in these circumstances can be hugely useful in evangelism.

I think it's unhelpful to suggest that the task of evangelism is essentially the responsibility of ministers.

I assume that normally the Lord will be bringing people to himself through the instrumentality of the preached word. However, we have to be very careful that we don't assume that if we are 'X' faithful in evangelism, then we will see 'Y' results right now. It doesn't work like that.

If you think that the gospel is all about what we can do, that the practice of it is optional, and that conversion is simply something that anyone can choose at any time, then I'm concerned that you'll think of evangelism as nothing more than a sales job where the prospect is to be won over to sign on the dotted line by praying a prayer, followed by an assurance that he is the proud owner of salvation.

A gospel that in no way offends the sinner has not been understood.

Discipling involves instruction and imitation.

Indeed, some secularists are so worried about Christianity, they think Christians are about as dangerous as Muslim terrorists. They get really worried when we don't invest our lives in this-worldly concerns. They look on us as unpredictable free agents. When we reject their relativism and make absolutist spiritual claims, they look at us as nervously as they would a terrorist with a suicide bomb strapped to his back. Of course, Christians are not into coercion in any form. But it is very hard to persuade secularists of that.

You have to push on both pedals to make the wheels go 'round. Similarly, you need faith in Christ as well as knowledge. The problem is that there are always Christians who want to push one pedal - either knowledge or experience. We need both.

According to the New Testament, the church is primarily a body of people who profess and give evidence that they have been saved by God's grace alone, for His glory alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Our examples of enduring hardship are often more powerful than our stories of success and triumph.

We are all called to have faith. So all of us are called to evangelize, while some are specially gifted for this ministry.

Evangelism is not simply looking at someone and saying, "Look, you have to become a Christian". Instead, an evangelist tells us the truth about who God is, and explains where we stand as a result of that. People can ignore us - indeed, they have every legal right to do so.

If joy or urgency are missing from our presentation of the gospel, then our testimony to Christ will be missing that sort of fullness that we find in the New Testament.

If you are not a member of the church you regularly attend, you may well be going to hell.

Once we see more of our need and understand more of what Christ has done for us, he will become more precious to us. And this, in turn, will enable our obedience far more than sheer grunt effort.

Evangelism is not imposing anything on anyone; it is simply sharing the truth.

I recognize that not all of us may have the same abilities and talents in sharing the gospel. But I want to keep the heat on all of us for getting the good news out there.

If you need wisdom and guidance, then pray to the Lord to guide you.

I love people thinking about apologetics. I just think that we have to be careful. We need to realize that we can argue about evolution or the existence of God or any number of things, but until we tell people the message of the cross, we have not evangelized them.

It doesn't matter whether we live in the 19th or 21st centuries; we face the same basic problems that everyone who lives between the Fall and the return of Christ faces.

We need to be realistic and recognize that there will be times when we won't be sharing our faith out of an overwhelming sense of joy. When that happens, that's a call to look at our own devotional lives. Are we putting our hearts and minds before the Lord and under his cross everyday? Do we remind ourselves continually that we have been ransomed by the death of the Saviour? When we meditate on Christ's death for us, it doesn't mean that we never have struggles in our obedience, but it does help.

What really concerns me is for Christians to understand the fundamentals of evangelism in a way that is helpful in the contemporary scene.

Membership is the church's corporate endorsement of a person's salvation.

Actually, having a few questions of your own shouldn't prevent you from sharing the gospel with others. You can explain to them that while you still have a few unresolved questions yourself, you don't have enough faith to not believe.

If you say that the gospel lays a claim upon people, then you are invading their personal space, and they feel as though you have no right to be there. Now we don't even begin preaching the gospel until we get into their personal space and they feel the demands of God upon them.

From the time of Cain until the last believer before Christ's return, we are all fundamentally in the same boat. We suffer the same spiritual afflictions and tendencies.

Christians, like everyone else, are prone to be selfish and scared, and wanting others to think well of them. So, although we possess what one part of us knows is the greatest news in the world, we don't act as though it is. Consequently, we share the gospel less than we should.

We do not fail in our evangelism if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not subsequently converted; we fail only if we do not faithfully tell the gospel at all.

The more you come to know the Bible - both in reading it extensively and also meditating on it deeply - the more integrated your understanding of all of life will be. And this means that there will be fewer steps between what you are doing at work and sharing your faith in Christ.

My task as a pastor is to remind people of the need for balance. If someone wants to stress personal union with Christ, I remind them of the need for knowledge as well. If they want to stress knowledge, I tell them about their need to depend on Christ.

Let's say that you want to do everything out of the joy that comes from knowing the Lord. Well, a lot of people aren't built like that emotionally. If they think that some sort of feeling is the basis for their action, they are going to feel justified sitting around, although they are going to feel bad that they have never taken one step of obedience because their heart is cold.

I don't see a clerical class in the New Testament to which evangelism has been delegated. Preaching is not the only way to evangelize; it can happen in everyday conversations too. And you don't need a special gift to witness to the Lord in these situations.

Worldliness in the church is a lot more pervasive than a lack of passion for evangelism. Nevertheless, one of the results of worldliness is a waning enthusiasm for evangelism.

We do live best in this world when we keep the next in mind.

I think many people in the church are probably concerned that they can't answer all the questions that might come up. I am sure this affects people by playing on their doubts - especially if they have their own questions that they are wrestling with.

The difference between apologetics and evangelism is that in apologetics, you are answering objections that the world raises, whereas in evangelism, you are bringing the message that Christ brought. So unbelievers tend to set the agenda in apologetics, and you set the agenda in evangelism.

I think we have to realize that God sometimes gives us more time to pray, and when he does this, we can pray that he will bless those who have opportunities to speak to others.

We need the word proclaimed so that we hear the gospel clearly, but then it's also very natural to have people talk about the Christian faith in ordinary conversation.

Pride causes us to care more about what our non-Christian friends think of us than what God will do to them in their sin.

People forget that there is a big difference between coercion and persuasion. The idea that evangelism is coercive is nonsense.

Too often preachers want to deal with people simply at the level of publicly accessible reason. We participate with them in their own epistemology. But this is not New Testament preaching. We have a message that is not from this world; it is from God. We don't know it by our own cleverness; we know it because God has revealed it.

God's eternal plan has always been to display his glory not just through individuals but through a corporate body.

There is simply so much reason to believe the good news of Jesus Christ in history, in Scripture, as well as in our own experience that it would take a leap of faith not to believe in the gospel.

God’s Word has always been His chosen instrument to create, convict, convert, and conform His people.

Keep going until you get good counsel that is persuasive for you that you should go elsewhere.

By the grace of God I am what I am

Prayer is the preview of God's action.

For a Christian, our fears about the future are rooted in those places where our will differs from God's will.

Unfortunately, many of our churches calibrate their life to these nominal Christians. The predictable result is that you get fake, hypocritical churches that confuse the message of the gospel and make it hard for others who are trying to do genuine evangelism.

Do you want to know that your new life is real? Commit yourself to a local group of saved sinners. Try to love them. Don’t just do it for three weeks. Don’t just do it for six months. Do it for years. And I think you’ll find out, and others will, too, whether or not you love God. The truth will show itself

Today is what the Lord has prepared you for.

The church arises only from the gospel. And a distorted church usually coincides with a distorted gospel.

I do want to pray for the Lord to glorify himself and, yes, I also will pray for an outpouring of his Spirit, but I also will rejoice in what he is doing now, and I will try to be a faithful steward of the gospel by preaching it "in season and out of season", as Paul reminds us. So I want to be careful not to make an idol out of revival, or to rely upon it to the point where I don't plan for evangelism.

As a pastor, I have the opportunity every week to share the gospel publicly in a way that most of the members sitting in our church do not. However, that doesn't absolve them of the responsibility for reaching others with the gospel.

If you are not offending people, then you are not an evangelist.

Humility is not an 'added extra,' one of the lesser Christian virtues. If you don't have humility, you may be lost.

We live in a time when people are increasingly skittish about evangelism - Christians and non-Christians alike. People are suspicious of evangelism, and misunderstand it, which contributes to our reluctance to share the gospel. When you add our fear of others' reactions as well as our natural laziness to the equation, it's not hard to see why we make such little progress in sharing our faith.

I don't mind talking about a football game - that's fine. I don't want Christians to be unnatural. But I do want to hear them talking fully, freely and naturally of the things of the Lord in their own lives too.

A church is not a Fortune 500 company. It's not simply another nonprofit organization, nor is it a social club. In fact, a healthy church is unlike any organization that man has ever devised, because man didn't devise it.

There are opportunities around. It takes time and motivation to take them.

Sadly, there are some fine Christian people who believe that the only way to advance the gospel is to pray for revival and nothing else. You don't know if they have any non-Christian friends or if they have ever shared the gospel with anybody in the last 30 years. It's depressing going to prayer meetings like that. I don't want to pray like that.

We mustn't be content to just sit around pointing out the errors in others; we actually need to be sharing the gospel and praying for people to be converted.

I heard about a pastor in a church of 5,000 people who employed two seminary students whose main responsibility was to get four new people baptized each week. When asked, "What happens if they can't meet the quota?", his response was, "Then I'll find two students who can". This man wasn't even remotely interested in true gospel preaching. He was results-driven.

We can't know at any given time how God will bless our faithful witness. So the apparent numerical growth of the church is never a good guide to how faithful we have been in evangelism.

God can use even stray, honest comments to bring people to himself.

I want to defend the right of employees to share the gospel in appropriate situations. Every situation requires wisdom and insight. I don't think it's wise to say, "Share the gospel every time you can". I can see all kinds of problems that come from that approach.

Sin claims to free but in fact it kills.

An evangelist no more imposes his views on others than a pilot imposes his views on his passengers when he lands a plane on a runway. I bet the passengers are glad!

Christians are defined not by our heritage, but by our mission; not by our blood, but by His.

We should want to evangelize because of the joy that God puts in our hearts. Ultimately, that's the best reason for sharing our faith.

Forgetfulness of God's grace is one of the greatest tools in the enemy's war against our souls.

Correct division should be preferred over corrupt unity.

Testimonies are great things about what the Lord has done for us, but no-one will be offended when you talk about what God has done for you. You need to be specific about sin, about Christ's death on the cross, about others' need for a saviour, and about their need to repent and trust in Christ.

Every believer should evangelize. I know some Christians think that evangelism is only for people with special gifts for it, but I don't believe the New Testament teaches that. While Paul does say that some believers have the call to be evangelists, all of us have the responsibility of evangelism.